Welfare Reform Bill

Kate Green Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to make my first contribution to this stage of proceedings on the Bill by welcoming an aspect of Government amendment 2. Specifically, it is enormously welcome that the short paragraph (e) will enable regulations to include

“a level of earnings below which earnings must not be reduced”

when overpayments are being recovered. That echoes the practice in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and other nations, which have legally enforceable, attachment-free limits when debts are being enforced, below which claimants must be protected. The limits relate to a national minimum income standard, which is set by a variety of methods. I am grateful to Professor John Veit-Wilson, Professor Elaine Kempson, Damon Gibbons of Debt on our Doorstep and Rev. Paul Nicolson of the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, who have helped me to prepare for this debate.

I would be pleased to see the principle of irreducible attachment-free minimums extended to all debts and to the unemployed, in particular to safeguard children’s, disability and housing benefits. That would prevent the damage that is done to physical and mental health by the enforcement of debt against poverty incomes, and the damage that that does to the capacity of the poorest adults to find and keep work.

In Sweden, the standards for a reasonable standard of living are uprated for price index changes every year and reset every five years by the National Board for Consumer Affairs. The standards are based on survey data on national household consumption patterns and current prices; statisticians and NBCA policy officials decide what is reasonable in terms of deviations from the averages. For example, for the past four years in the UK, the prices of food and domestic fuel have increased faster than the retail prices index and the consumer prices index. The standards are used by the social service board for setting benefits and by the tax authority for setting the tax threshold. The tax threshold is also used by the court enforcement authority to set its attachment-free sum for debt enforcement. That sum consists of two parts: variable housing costs and a fixed standard normal sum for all other living expenses.

There are clearly other methodologies for setting the minimum acceptable income standard below which incomes should be protected and attachment-free. In Committee, we explored work that is under way in this country at the universities of York and Loughborough, among others, to develop a minimum income standard that can command and be informed by the perceptions of the public. There is a range of options for assessing and setting the minimum standard below which there will not be deductions. There are examples from other nations where such a minimum is enforceable by the courts and related to national minimum income standards. In countries that have legally enforceable limits, the courts, in setting payment plans, can ensure that the debtor is left with a minimum level of income, taking account of family size.

I hope that the small but vital paragraph (e) in Government amendment 2 will begin an era of cross-party support for legally enforceable irreducible and attachment-free minimums when people are repaying debts, which are based on minimum income standards. That would contribute to a reduction in the huge cost of mental illness to the health service and the wider economy, and make a significant contribution to the reduction of poverty in the UK. I hope that we have an ambitious approach to setting that minimum.

[Chris Grayling]

I start by saying that I very much appreciate the comments of the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green). I listened carefully to her points, a number of which she made in Committee. She has given a great deal of thought to these matters, and although I cannot offer her a guarantee that we will do all the things she wishes, I can say to her that we will take great care, in the regulations attached to the Bill, to ensure that we get the right balance. It has been clear for a long time in this country, and remains absolutely clear under the current Government, that in setting the levels of any deduction we have to be extremely careful not to tip people into hardship. In particular, we must not encourage them to leave work and end up moving them and their families down the poverty scale.

The hon. Lady and the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) asked how we would determine the level of earnings below which deductions for overpayments cannot be made. Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and the circumstances of different families are very different. There may be a case in which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) suggested, there is a deduction for child support, or the number of children in a family or a disability may be factors. Great care therefore has to be exercised.

The minimum level that we will pursue will be determined to ensure that the debtor is left with sufficient income to maintain themselves and their family, in line with similar provisions in the Attachment of Earnings Act 1971. We therefore plan to use the same basis that the previous Government used—for example, to determine deductions from benefit payments.

In many cases, however, a direct earnings attachment will be implemented with little negotiation with the debtor. There will be a prescribed minimum level that will not take account of individual circumstances. We will try to create a system whereby we are mindful of the need to reflect the circumstances of the individual, but we cannot go the whole way, and we certainly cannot go quite as far as the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston would wish.

If a debtor finds that they are unable to cope with the deductions being made from their earnings, they should contact us to discuss an alternative payment rate. Of course, they can avoid being placed in that situation, bearing in mind that we are discussing not people who are struggling to deal with something that they have already agreed but those who have wilfully refused to enter an agreement with us and are basically saying, “I’m not paying the money back”, or who have not even got to the point of saying anything to us at all.

Debtors who are repaying their overpayment by means of a direct earnings attachment will, in line with those repaying by other methods, be able to claim that the repayment rate causes them hardship and ask for it to be reduced. Although we of course have a responsibility to recover overpayments in order to protect public funds, we also take into account an individual’s financial and personal circumstances. The hon. Lady articulated a strong case for her points, but I cannot offer her quite as much as she would wish. However, I can offer her an assurance that we will always take an individual’s circumstances into account, particular where poverty, deprivation and hardship could arise.

The right hon. Member for East Ham made a point about employers. We will, of course, use the same mechanism for the attachment orders in the Bill as is used for child maintenance deductions. That process is well established through the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission system, and prior to that through the Child Support Agency, so it should not cause employers to recast their processes and do things very differently. On that basis, I am confident that it should not represent a significant additional burden on employers.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the provision for a £1,000 fine. In truth, there is no excuse for a refusal to engage in any part of the process. The orders will arise only because an individual claimant has refused to engage, and there is no real excuse for an employer to refuse to engage either. The matter should not be complicated, and it certainly should not be complex enough to cause an employer to decline an expansion in business or a recruitment to fill a vacancy. The process is established and many employers up and down the country are used to dealing with it, and I do not believe there will be significant extra burden on business.

The right hon. Gentleman asked how much employers could deduct for the administration charge, and the answer is an amount not in excess of £1 for each deduction. He asked for an assurance that the measure will not damage work incentives. The answer to that is that, as with all debt recovery, we must of course be mindful of the Department’s welfare obligations. As I said, recovery of overpaid benefits should not cause undue hardship. In the calculation of a repayment, we certainly would not want to push someone into a position in which they have to leave work to avoid payment under a DEA.

The operation of the DEA does not mean that the debtor will commence the repayment of their debt earlier than they would under another repayment method. The debtor will have had ample opportunity to make other arrangements to pay, or indeed to show that suspension of recovery was applicable in their case. We are not talking about people who have had no chance to engage and discuss.

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[Stephen Timms]

If that would mean that people who are currently able to work for more than 16 hours had to give up their jobs altogether, I would not welcome it. That would be a seriously retrograde step. I accept that there is a case for supporting the cost of child care for people in mini jobs as well, but if the additional resources are not available to fund that, it would be a terrible mistake to press ahead and claw that money from people who depend on it to make work pay at the moment.

The Secretary of State set out at the seminar, at which I think the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) was present, some of the possible options. The Children’s Society has analysed some of the options and concluded that under one of them a family could pay out £1.56p for every additional pound earned. Ministers told us that that problem would be eliminated by universal credit, but it now appears that, if they proceed on the basis of that option, the new system will be a great deal worse than the current one, and will introduce a draconian new penalty for working parents. As I said to her, there is a good case for supporting child care for people in mini jobs, but it must not come at the expense of parents being helped at the moment.

The recent report from the Resolution Foundation and Gingerbread also underlined the point that spreading the same budget among a lot more people will mean families losing money for every additional hour they work. The Government are right to express the aspiration that it should always pay to be in work, but in this case, if they pursue the option set out in the seminar, something will be lost in translation, because families will have to pay out in order to work. The current system does a far better job; the new system that is envisaged will be a severely retrograde step, if it has the effect of taking more than £1.50 off people for each extra pound they earn. The Government appear poised, once they have finally worked out what their policy is in this area, to make work far less attractive than at the moment.

The Government have failed to come up with a policy, so our new clause 2 proposes one: it would retain the percentage of child care costs covered and the cash limits in the current system; it would ensure that work continues to pay for those for whom it pays at the moment; and it would allow the retention of the existing 16 hours’ threshold. The Government say that they cannot afford any extra spending on child care at the moment. My case to the House is that support for child care for those in mini jobs would need to wait until there is funding for it in order to ensure that jobs of 16 hours per week actually pay, as they do at the moment.

[Kate Green]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is disingenuous of the Government to make proposals to fund child care for mini jobs, given that the child care market is simply not designed in that way? Finding short episodes of child care for just a few hours a week is extremely difficult for parents, and could make child care provision even more financially unviable and drive providers out of the market?

[Stephen Timms]

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

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

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

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[Stephen Timms]

The hon. Gentleman has a good deal more experience in these matters, if I may say so, than some of his Front-Bench colleagues who are dealing with them at the moment. Good provision, particularly for child care support, was of course made through the tax credit system. That strong support for the costs of child care is why there was such a dramatic rise in lone parent employment under the previous Government. I supported that and I suspect from what the hon. Gentleman just hinted at that he supported it and continues to support it today. The problem is that once tax credits are abolished and universal credit takes their place, we have no idea how child care is going to be supported in the future. That is why I am—rather modestly, I think—appealing for the Government to tell us.

[Kate Green]

Does my right hon. Friend also agree that one of the real concerns we face as a result of universal credit forcing us to look at lumping all the different strands of financial support for families into a single payment is that all the eggs are in one basket, so if one thing goes wrong, the whole benefit—the whole structure of financial support for that family—could collapse?

[Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. For that very reason, the risks are great indeed. When I come on to speak to amendment 24 in a few moments, I will point out that if people go beyond a prescribed level of savings, they will lose all that help under all those headings.

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[Kate Green]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that one of the attractions of supporting self-employment is that it often particularly helps those who find it difficult to access the traditional labour market, such as women, because they need to combine work with caring responsibilities and therefore need more flexible hours, and disabled people, who may not be able to access full-time work in a structured workplace but can do some work on their own at home? We also certainly know that there is a long-standing tradition of some of our ethnic minority communities finding that self-employment is the best way for them to sustain economic independence.

[Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that self-employment is a crucial element of our economy for many people, including those with caring responsibilities; others who, for other reasons, are not necessarily able to commit to a full-time job; and, indeed, those who simply want the opportunity to build up a business for themselves—it is crucial that the system supports them. Tax credits have done so, but I am afraid that universal credit will not. That is a real worry and the approach being taken flies in the face of Government statements of support for self-employment.

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[Chris Grayling]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. The whole purpose of universal credit is to provide assistance to people who are trying to get back to work and to ensure that work always pays. I hope that the women of Bridgend will benefit, like those across the country, from the introduction of universal credit and the extra support that it will provide to ensure that they are better off in work.

[Kate Green]

I noted the Minister’s reminder a few moments ago that transitional protection would also be available in respect of child care costs. Can he confirm that one change in circumstances that can be predicted is that child care costs will vary between term time and school holidays and that that will not trigger a change in circumstances that would lead to the cancellation of transitional protection?

[Chris Grayling]

It is not our intention that routine or minor changes in circumstances would lead to the loss of transitional protection. The requirement for child care clearly fluctuates during the course of the year, but follows a set pattern. It is not our intention for a moment to remove transitional protection in that situation, nor is it our intention to remove it in an environment in which there is an annual increase—RPI or CPI—in the rate of child care. We are looking at material changes in circumstances, and I certainly would not envisage the change from term time to holidays as a material change.

The other issue that I have with the Opposition’s proposals is that they would remove the ability for people to take up mini jobs. For women re-entering the workplace after a lengthy time out of it, there is a bigger barrier than needs to be the case. One of the strengths of the universal credit system is the flexibility for people to take on mini jobs. The level of prescription set out in the Opposition’s proposals would set up unnecessary and inappropriate barriers to getting people back to work.

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[Harriett Baldwin]

I shall deal with some of those other points in my later remarks, because they are all important subjects for debate. Indeed, the proposals in new clause 2 suggest a figure of £300 a week for this element. I was genuinely surprised that there were people who were getting as much as that. I do acknowledge the cost of child care in central London: I have paid it for many years, so I recognise what we are talking about. However, £300 a week is a lot of money—it works out as £15,600 a year. It is indeed a generous cap.

I propose that we turn the child care element on its head. The initial move in what we might call the slide into work should be reimbursed at 100%. When people make the difficult first choice to go into work, the first few hours of child care, perhaps up to the earnings disregard—I ask the Minister to ask the Department to consider some of the maths involved—should be reimbursed at 100% as they make that important transition. When they reach the level of annual earnings represented by the disregards that we are talking about, the tapering of the contribution that the person in work would make to their child care would begin.

[Kate Green]

The hon. Lady has obviously given this matter very careful thought, and I have great respect for the way in which she is approaching it. Does she not see a risk that the mini-job would become a trap, and it would be impossible for people to be incentivised financially to increase either their earnings or their hours of work, because they would start to lose child care support?

[Harriett Baldwin]

The hon. Lady underestimates the extent to which the 16-hour job has already become a trap. I think we all know people who have been trapped in one. I am proposing that when people move on to that slide and have greater support in those initial steps into work, they will become much more familiar with the world of work. When they move into taking on more hours and so on—let us not forget that once somebody has moved into the workplace they often find themselves eligible for a promotion or for the next move up the employment ladder, which might coincide with their children rising five and going to primary school—the fact that they are on more of a slide will mean that because they have extra work they will be able to share more of the cost of their child care. I would like to see some experimentation with the formula so that the child care support for the first steps into work is more generous, and the tapering begins further down the line.

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[Harriett Baldwin]

My point is that we should try to concentrate the support that the taxpayer gives into the early hours of going back into work. I would like the taper, and what can be afforded, to be announced annually by the Chancellor at the Dispatch Box, just like the overall taper in universal credit. The country’s potential to support people in those choices would go along those lines.

My second point about the alternatives to new clause 2 that the Department might consider concerns the need to recognise that the cost of child care varies greatly with the age of the child—although I acknowledge this goes somewhat against the simplicity of universal credit. Of course when children go to school the cost of child care out of hours drops dramatically from the cost of providing child care for an 18-month-old child. I suggest some form of annual review of child care support that takes into account the age of the child or children. We should also consider this in terms of the annual envelope, because that would address the issue raised by the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) about the predictable fact that holiday cover is an annual challenge for working parents, and reflect the fact that there is that fluctuation for parents of children at school.

I wanted to outline why I do not agree with new clause 2 and why I welcome the fact that the Government are having an open dialogue about the £2 billion that they are putting into child care support, and to emphasise that all families, whether they are on universal credit or not in the benefit system at all, have to make behavioural and financial choices about the world of work. I would like the support that the state gives to encourage people into work to be concentrated on those first few hours of child care.

[Kate Green]

I want to comment first on the proposed child care amendments. Owing to the funding envelope within which we work we face a difficult financial choice about which group of parents to assist with child care costs. I warmly welcome the implication in the comments of the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin). Obviously, one would want to support funding for child care as far as possible, and in making an early selection about which group of parents should benefit we do not want to shut off the possibility of financial support for child care for more parents being an aspiration over time.

In saying that we wish to protect the child care support available for parents who work more than 16 hours, we are certainly not saying that we might not aspire in due course to see child care supported beyond that. The loss of financial support for child care will make working completely unviable and will be a dangerous and retrograde step that I do not believe Ministers have fully analysed.

It is important that we do not see child care provision simply as instrumentalising the return of parents to paid employment. Nowhere in the debate today have we said much about the welfare of the child. We do not know what short hours child care, if any, will be available in the child care market. It certainly seems to be a complicated and unlikely form of child care for parents to be able to access and it does not reflect the way in which child care provision is currently organised. Of course, child care providers might respond if more parents were seeking to buy shorter hours of child care, but the question that arises is whether it is a financially viable model for providers. I am not aware of Ministers investigating that, and I would feel more reassured about the validity of their proposals if they had been able to say a little more about what they meant for the market, its resilience and its potential for growth.

I would also have felt more reassured if Ministers had analysed the extent to which very short episodes of child care are or are not good for children. I genuinely do not know the answer, but I have a sense that putting a child in child care for two or three hours on two or three days a week presents an unstable stop-go approach. We certainly know that, for younger children, one-on-one care with a single main carer with whom the child can form a stable relationship is very important. Although I do not rule out the possibility that shorter episodes of child care could be good for children, I have not seen any sign that Ministers have investigated whether that is the case. It is extremely difficult for us to support a measure that has given no attention to the well-being of children.

On the proposals—or lack of proposals—in relation to free school meals, I do not blame Ministers for seeking to pass the problem to the Social Security Advisory Committee because it is an extremely difficult one to solve. The previous Government had been concerned about the cliff edge that exists as parents move off benefits and into employment and free school meals are removed wholesale. Parents have repeatedly told us as politicians that that is an incredible financial shock to low-income families as parents move into work. We have no idea what Ministers will propose in due course.

We have been struggling to find the model that will work. Models have been bandied around that could leave parents able to afford school meals on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but not on Thursday or Friday, or that might mean that they can afford school meals for some children in the family, but not for others. There is a real concern that what Ministers propose will still lead us to a cliff edge.

We need to be clear about the principles that we seek to achieve. I would like absolute clarity from Ministers that when they receive the recommendations and advice of SSAC, they will ensure that support is available for all children who need free school meals; that the system that is put in place will be simple for families, simple for schools to administer and simple for the Government, too; that child health will not be compromised because children currently eligible for free school meals and therefore accessing a healthier diet are in future shut out of such provision; and that the design of the system will not create work disincentives.

I have not yet seen any evidence that all those circles can easily be squared, unless Ministers are prepared to look again at the direction of travel that the Labour Government were following, which was, over time, to move towards extending the reach of free school meals. I accept that in the present financial climate it will be difficult to get all the way there, but Ministers need to think now about how they design the cliff edges and the tapers, because that is the foundation on which a future extension of free school meals to more children would be built.

The most comprehensive option would be to include a per child school meal element in the universal credit, which crucially would be paid directly to schools to provide meals, so that parents were not—by force, in many cases—obliged to use the money to meet other bills. I would like us to consider how a model could be designed that, when funding allows, would allow the money to be paid in full until the family reached their earnings disregard level, at which stage it would be withdrawn from universal credit at the taper rate, which we would like to have been maintained at 65%. That would mean that both DWP and families were contributing to the cost of school meal expansion. Entitlement could end when universal credit payments end, preferably when the imputed value of the school meal had been fully tapered out.

Achieving that vision immediately would undoubtedly create additional cost, which I recognise that Ministers want to avoid. Nevertheless, it is important that they give us assurances that they will seek at the outset to design a system that could be developed in that direction over time and as funding allows.

Amendment 68 relates to carers. A small group of carers seems to have slipped the notice of Ministers when considering the impact of the design of universal credit, specifically in relation to earnings disregards. We know that many carers can work only a very small number of hours because they are seeking to balance paid employment with substantial caring responsibilities. We also know that those few hours of work are very precious to them. They enable them to maintain contact with the labour market, they widen their social and external circles, and they provide a bit of a respite for the carers from the stress and strain of caring.

Where those carers are in receipt of income support, they can at present earn up to £20 a week from doing a few hours of paid employment without it affecting their benefit. In their proposals for universal credit, Ministers have provided for disregards for carers in a number of situations, but there seem to be some groups who will lose the benefit of that disregard as a result of the proposals before us. For example, some carers are caring for someone who does not live in the same home as the carer. Those carers may no longer enjoy the benefit of the earnings disregard. That seems completely at odds with the aspiration that Ministers have expressed for the universal credit, which is that every additional hour of work will pay.

I hope that Ministers will give careful attention to amendment 68 and consider what can be done to ensure that all carers are incentivised to take on even a few hours of work. What assessment have Ministers made of the number of carers who are left outside the ambit of the current disregard for carers, and of the cost of extending such support to all carers?

Finally, we cannot stress often enough how important it is that we ensure that payments for children go to the main carer of the child. Ministers seem to think it is good enough that couples have the option to make that decision, but very many families will, by default, allow all payments of universal credit to go to one member of a couple in a couple household, and we know from the evidence of the way in which the pension credit has been received in couple households that that is most likely to be the man.

[Charlie Elphicke]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Kate Green]

I will, but the hon. Gentleman will tell me that life is different now and that families share child-caring responsibilities more equally. I am sorry to tell him that although I would love that to be the case, all the research evidence says that it still is not. This is not in any event a gender point, although it would mean more money for women, because women are the main carers of children. Therefore, if we want to ensure that money is spent on children, we need to route it to the main carers, and that primarily means that we need to route it to women in couples.

I am surprised that the Conservative party has been so reluctant to accept that. The last time we had such an attack on the principle of money being paid to mothers for the care of children, it was Conservative ladies who were the best defenders of the interests of mothers and families, and I do not think the picture has changed that much. I know that the hon. Gentleman has an idealistic and ambitious view on the issue, and it would be good to hear it.

[Charlie Elphicke]

I thank the hon. Lady for her generous introduction to my intervention. I take issue with her argument not in relation to who has primary responsibility for child care, but in relation to culture. In times gone by there was a much more divided culture, which is why older people see life very much in the way she puts it, but the reality is that joint working has changed that. My issue is not about economic power and management, but about sharing in the family unit as a whole, and that is backed up by the figures, which show that 76% of partnered mothers are working. Life has changed, and she should understand that the economics are much more shared these days than they used to be.

[Kate Green]

I am prepared to accept that life is changing, albeit rather more slowly than the hon. Gentleman suggests, but let us not forget that the partnered mothers who work do so largely in part-time jobs and that their incomes usually make the smaller contribution to family budgets. Let us not forget the extensive evidence that continues to show that women fulfil the bulk of child care responsibilities. Let us not take the risk that by removing money from the main carers of children, whether that is the fundamental intention or not, children become the losers in the drive to achieve the glowing future that the hon. Gentleman seeks to describe. All the evidence suggests that money is most likely to be spent on children when it is paid to their main carers, so I am concerned that that should be built into our system as a default to ensure that that is where the money goes.

Other colleagues wish to contribute to the debate and we have had a full discussion on a number of issues raised by the proposed amendments, so I do not need to go into further detail on many of those points, other than to offer my strong support for amendment 26. As we move towards this fundamental change to our social security system, which Ministers themselves have described as the most far reaching since the introduction of the welfare state after the second world war, it is absolutely imperative that, if anything, more welfare advice is available, at least during the transitional period, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) has pointed out, because it will surely be needed. Today’s debate is reaffirming the fact that this will not be a simple benefit to administer in practice. If we are to maximise take-up and ensure that people receive their entitlements, which I know from our discussions in Committee is the goal of Ministers, it is vital that proper advice is in place to support people as they navigate their way through the introduction of the new system under the Bill.

[Guto Bebb]

It is a great privilege to be called to speak in the debate. Having been here all afternoon, I feel as though I am back in the Bill Committee. My hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) must again send my apologies to Downing street, because I have decided not to attend a party there in order to be here this evening.

I wish to speak about four specific issues and to new clauses 3 and 4 and amendments 23, 24, 27, 28 and 29. Before doing so, it is important to set today’s good and wide-ranging discussions in context. It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), who spoke with great knowledge and understanding on these matters in Committee and in her contribution to the House today, but an important point that we must bear in mind is this: the reason we need to look at changing the current welfare system is that it has not worked.

I challenged the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) on the figures for the number of people in the United Kingdom who have never worked, which worsened from 2000 to 2010, and the figures I quoted for Scotland were supplied by the Office for National Statistics. The figures for the United Kingdom are absolutely deplorable. The number of people who have never worked increased from 572,000 in 2000 to 841,000 in 2010, when the previous Government left office. As a Member who represents a Welsh constituency, it is disappointing to state that the figures in Wales also show a deterioration. The context for the welfare reform package, therefore, is the fact that the current system is not working.

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[Ms Buck]

That is a reasonable option to allow people to take, but I seriously doubt whether it is an answer to the problem, for a whole host of reasons. In particular, there is a striking imbalance between where the social housing occupation is and where the demand for private rented accommodation is.

Many things worry me about what the Minister has just said, because here we are on Report, months after an impact assessment set out what the proposals are likely to mean, and suddenly an option as to how the Government think that the penalty might be avoided is thrown in. Let us sit down and have a proper impact assessment—a proper review. Let us see, for example, how any income from rental would be treated in the benefits system, because that could become subject to the same rules as non-dependant deduction, which would not leave people better off at all. Before the Minister asks me to regard it as a serious option, let us see exactly how it would be workable as regards the match between demand and supply and how it would be treated for the purposes of tax and other benefits.

[Kate Green]

Does my hon. Friend accept that there is a likelihood that from time to time, at least, if not constantly, disabled people may need extra space to accommodate overnight care? Therefore, the prospect of a tenant—a stranger, possibly—moving into their home would be completely impractical as well as potentially rather alarming.

[Ms Buck]

That is absolutely right; my hon. Friend makes a valid point. I am not going to say that just because someone is in a social tenancy they would not be able to have somebody else living in their home. People make that decision in the private sector; morally, it is not a completely absurd thing to do. However, I do not know whether it deals with the problem in any meaningful sense or what all the implications will be.

People with disabilities are, by definition, much more likely to have formal or informal care or to want the capacity to have friends and relatives coming in to provide them with care. Yet we know from the Government’s impact assessment that 66% of all those affected by the cut in benefit in the social housing sector are categorised as disabled—not all severely disabled; I understand that—and that between 101,000 and 108,000 of those properties, depending on which definition one accepts, are specifically adapted for their needs. In Committee, the Minister made some reassuring noises about the problem. She told us that the Government were prepared to

“look in detail at how we can ensure that there are exemptions for individuals who are disabled, where their homes may have been subject to extensive adaptations to accommodate that."

However, earlier in the debate she had told us:

“Providing an exemption for all adapted accommodation would not be the right approach”

and that exemptions should be applied only where making a fresh adaptation would cost more than

“allowing someone to stay where they are.”––[Official Report, Welfare Reform Public Bill Committee, 3 May 2011; c. 685-716.]

That prompts several important questions about the sheer level of bureaucracy that will be necessary to send somebody into every single one of those 108,000 adapted properties to carry out an official survey to establish the extent of those adaptations and come up with a cost-benefit analysis to see whether a move to alternative property will produce a cost benefit, and if it does not to assess the margin of error. If an adaptation would cost £10,000, but it was deemed that the cost saving would be £9,500, would the person with the disability be expected to move from their flat? Would the difference be £1 or £20? This is one of those counter-arguments that sounds seductively simple until one starts picking away at it and finds that it does not sound very good at all.