Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Karen Buck and Maria Miller

Wednesday 15th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ms Buck]

Why does the Minister think that almost every specialist organisation, voluntary group and charity in the field thinks that that is a problem? Is it because they do not understand it?

[Maria Miller]

The hon. Lady will know that we have had a call for evidence, and we will be considering the many different views of the organisations she mentions. We will of course want to work with those organisations to make sure that our policies work well. I remember some confusion in Committee about whether we were talking about the social fund or the discretionary social fund, so perhaps we need to make sure that people really understand our policy. Empowering local organisations at local level—the sorts of organisations that the hon. Lady named—to work with vulnerable groups in the individual community will, I think, be welcomed by many organisations on the ground.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Karen Buck and Maria Miller

Monday 13th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ms Buck]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The scheme is not voluntary. Voluntary downsizing has a proud history. Good local authorities and housing associations provide voluntary downsizing, which is sensible. The Government’s measure requires 108,000 households whose properties have been adapted for disabled purposes to take, within the next 18 months, a significant cut in their housing benefit, or to move, regardless of the value of that adaptation. The Minister implies a mammoth bureaucratic exercise to evaluate every one of those adaptations, and to establish individual cost-benefit analyses in every case, in the hope, which I suspect will be a forlorn one, that an appropriate property will be available for people to move into when they fall foul of such analyses. That appropriate property does not have to be within the local authority area or even the region where those people have family, friends, support and, in some cases, employment.

Those two concerns, of the many that the Opposition have on housing costs, are the subject of the amendments that we have tabled. I hope that the Minister, who has made sympathetic noises on both issues in Committee, goes a little further tonight, and gives us solid and binding reassurances that there is a way of resolving the benefit trap that will catch so many people, in order, as Ministers have frequently stated in the media, to deal with a very small number of high-value claimants who dominate the media agenda. It is not fair to capture 108,000 disabled people and 750,000 claimants of local housing allowance, all of whom will be affected by the housing benefit cuts, in order to deal with a small number of extreme cases, on which we could otherwise have had a sensible debate about attempting to resolve.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Maria Miller)]

I thank the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck)for taking the time to talk to us about her amendments today. When I heard some of the reports on the radio this morning I thought that today would be a big day, when we would really be able to understand the Opposition’s approach to welfare reform—but on the basis both of Question Time and of the debates on the Bill, many of us feel that there is a lot more work to be done.

Today was an important opportunity for Opposition Front Benchers to set out their amendments and how they would change the Bill, to show how they would deal with housing benefit. I have listened hard, but there is still no clarity. In fact, what we have heard is more and more contradictions from the hon. Lady. In her opening remarks she said that she did not want the housing benefit bill to rise, and she did not agree with housing benefit taking the strain. However, the amendments run completely contrary to those objectives. Amendment 31 would significantly erode the savings that the Government propose, and amendment 32 would draw the exemption so wide that it would be far broader than anything recommended by the specialist organisations. That is a concern.

Nor are we any wiser as a result of the Opposition Leader’s speech today, which did more to create further confusion in this area. He talked about supporting people into housing as a result of their volunteering or working. That may sound familiar, but if the Opposition seek to link volunteering and work with housing, we hope that they do not intend to undermine eligibility for lone parents when it comes to their housing needs. It is difficult to comprehend how the hon. Lady will achieve her objectives with her amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Maria Miller]

Will the hon. Lady forgive me for making a little progress? Many other hon. Members want to come in on this debate, and I want to set out my response to the amendments before we run out of time.

Before I turn to the specific amendments, I want to pick up on what the hon. Member for Westminster North said about rising homelessness. I am sure that she believed in the effectiveness of the previous Government, but she cannot expect the sort of impacts on homelessness that she implied after just one month of a policy being in place. I do not accept that the policies we are advocating will have the impacts on homelessness that she talked about. She has to get real: these policies have only been in place since April, and could not be driving the sorts of changes that she mentioned by this stage.

The hon. Lady said that her premise was affordability and access to housing. May I remind her that, given that 40%—and in some areas, including coastal towns, 70%—of those in the private rental market are in receipt of housing benefit, it is critical that we keep control of the amount of money going out in housing benefit? That way we can help the very first-time buyers whom she purports to want to help, who are finding it so difficult to get into the purchase market at the moment, and who need to go into the rental market. The previous Government let those people down by not keeping control of housing benefit rents during their tenure.

[Ms Buck]

The statistic that 40% of the market is subsidised by the local housing allowance is central to the Government’s argument. Will the hon. Lady finally, helpfully source that figure? Figures released in the English housing survey last month confirmed that only 24% of those in the total private rented sector in England were on LHA. Although there are regional variations, it would be helpful if we could finally and definitively have the source for that 40% claim.

[Maria Miller]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question. I shall be happy to write to her with the full details, and to remind her that the proportion is only 40% on average; as I said, it is 70% in some coastal areas. That is a significant issue that helps to determine the rental rates that many people—[Interruption.] I think I just said that I would write to the hon. Lady with the details. I do not have them to hand now.

The important matter to which I now turn is my response to the two amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Westminster North and the one tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central (Jenny Willott) for us to consider today. We said in the universal credit White Paper that an appropriate amount would be added to the universal credit award to meet the costs of rent for claimants. We also said that levels of support for rent would be broadly similar to the support provided through housing benefit at the time that claimants began to move on to universal credit. In the private rented sector, we will build on the local housing allowance approach, incorporating the reforms that we are making over the coming year. This will give private rental tenants access to about 30% of the rental market in their areas, including most of London.

We also need, however, to do more to constrain the growth in rents, which is why increases will be limited in line with the consumer prices index. This will ensure that we continue to put the sort of downward pressure on rents that is so important to keeping control of our budgets and to affordability for those not in the housing benefit market.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Karen Buck and Maria Miller

Monday 13th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

I can absolutely assure my hon. Friend that that will be the case and that we will carry forward that provision from disability living allowance.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I am sure that it is not the Government’s intention in time-limiting employment and support allowance—the other disability-related benefit—to leave nearly 7,000 cancer patients potentially up to £94 a week worse off. Today, Macmillan Cancer Support and others warn that that is exactly the consequence of the Government’s policy. Will the Under-Secretary take the opportunity of the Report stage of the Welfare Reform Bill to modify that damaging policy?

[Maria Miller]

The hon. Lady has asked about employment and support allowance. We will obviously ensure that people in the most difficult circumstances continue to receive the support they require through the support group. For disability living allowance, it is absolutely vital that we do not analyse people on their condition, but examine the problems that they encounter in living independent lives. I think that she would expect us to do that.

Low-income Households

Debate between Karen Buck and Maria Miller

Tuesday 14th September 2010 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Maria Miller)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Clark. I understand this is the first time that you have chaired Westminster Hall. You have done us proud and done a great job. I congratulate the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) on securing the debate. As the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) said, this is not the first time that we have debated these issues in this Parliament, and I am sure it will not be the last. However, it does give me an opportunity to set out, in a more measured manner perhaps, the impact of the policies that we are talking about as a coalition Government.

We have had a wide-ranging debate, and in the time left, I hope that I can cover as many as possible of the points that hon. Members raised. The hon. Member for Westminster North talked about challenges in relation to the perceptions of the Labour party’s record in government, but she must acknowledge that the facts speak for themselves when it comes to the impact, or lack of impact, of Labour policies on issues of poverty. As the hon. Member for Colchester said, there are still far too many children living in poverty in this country after more than a decade of Labour Government. Labour talked a great deal about trying to reverse the problems of inequality in this country, but it failed to tackle the root causes of poverty, leaving a catalogue of entrenched social problems that the coalition Government must now deal with.

[Ms Buck]

I hoped that I was being fair in stating that I did not think that the Labour Government got everything right and tackled every problem. In the interests of equivalent fairness, will the Minister accept that child poverty increased threefold during the time of the previous, Conservative Government and inequality soared?

[Maria Miller]

The hon. Lady is again being selective in her recollection of the facts. When we examine the level of child poverty now, we see that it has gone up since 2004 under Labour. She can throw her hands up in horror, but unfortunately the facts speak for themselves.

There are other facts that we need to acknowledge. Levels of household debt have gone up significantly. In 2009, there were almost 160,000 personal insolvencies in this country. Those were record levels; there were 30,000 more than in the previous year. The hon. Lady must look at the whole picture when giving the facts in the debate.

Further assertions have been made that progress was made under the previous Government because of the level of investment that they put in, but as we all know, investment alone is not the answer. We need structural changes in the way in which support systems work. In relation to welfare, spending on social security and tax credits has increased by about £60 billion in real terms over the past 10 years, yet as the hon. Member for Colchester said, there has been an inability to tackle the issues of poverty, and the performance on inequality has either stalled or deteriorated.

Now we face the biggest legacy from Labour of all, which is that we have the biggest deficit of any G20 country. It is incumbent on the present Government to get that deficit under control; otherwise, stability, either in interest rates or in our ability to provide employment for people or to encourage strong business, will be undermined. It is therefore absolutely right that the Government put first and foremost trying to get the deficit under control.

The Labour party now understands the failure of its policies in this area and that keeping on spending at unsustainable levels is not the way forward. The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) was a Minister in the Department in which I am now a Minister when that spending spiralled out of control. She will know that the cuts would have had to come anyway and that her Department was already tabling 20% cuts. The problem is that the Opposition would not tell us where those cuts were to come from. Despite their being asked repeatedly, those details were not forthcoming.