Oral Answers to Questions

Kate Green Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

It is indeed a dramatic and critical reform for our welfare system. I will highlight just one statistic: for every 100 people who moved into work under the old jobseeker’s allowance system, 113 do so under universal credit.

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

Last week, DWP informed Members of Parliament that our constituents would have to give specific and precise explicit consent if we are to help them with full universal credit claims with which they have difficulty. I think that that will significantly inhibit our ability to assist our constituents. Will the Minister reassure the House that measures will be put in place to ensure that MPs can support our constituents effectively?

[Damian Hinds]

Of course we want hon. Members to be able to support their constituents, but the universal credit full service system is different because the online account allows the user to access a greater breadth of their data. The claimant holds the key to those data, and implied consent cannot be assumed. A claimant can give their consent via their journal, and that is what has to be done to enable a Member to act on their behalf.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Welfare Delivery (Caroline Nokes)]

My right hon. Friend is right to point out that the benefit cap is working. It has brought about behavioural change, and evaluation of the current cap level has found that capped households are 41% more likely to go into work than similar, uncapped households. More than that, 38% of those capped said that they were doing more to find work, a third were submitting more applications and a fifth went to more interviews.

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

T2. New recipients of support who are in the work-related activity group will cease to receive the work-related activity component payment as of this April. As we have only a short six weeks until those claimants are hit by this change in policy, can the Minister tell us exactly what additional support they will receive?

[Penny Mordaunt]

The first thing I would say to the hon. Lady is that although the policy is being introduced in April, it will not start to have an impact on individuals until the summer. There is a personalised support package—13 measures that are outlined in the Green Paper—and she will know that we are also looking at ways in which we can reduce an individual’s household outgoings that are not related to finding work.

Point of Order

Kate Green Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2017 Commons Chamber

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

On a point of order, Mr Speaker.

[Mr Speaker]

I understand that the point of order flows directly from a question, so, exceptionally, I will take it if it is brief.

[Kate Green]

I am very grateful, Mr Speaker. I wish to follow up the answer that the Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work gave me a few moments ago about the work-related activity component of the employment and support allowance. The Minister said that no one would be affected by the change before the summer, but the DWP website says—and, indeed, I think we always understood—that it will take effect in April. I wonder whether you, Mr Speaker, will invite the Minister to clarify or correct the record.

[The Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work (Penny Mordaunt)]

rose—

Oral Answers to Questions

Kate Green Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

Everybody should benefit from a strong economy, but as well as introducing the national living wage the Government have announced plans to reduce corporation tax further to 17% and to increase the employment allowance, which could be worth up to £3,000 a year.

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

Is it not perverse of the Government to have reduced work allowances and universal credit at the same time as we have seen increases in the national living wage, meaning that the overall benefit to individuals in work is actually reduced?

[Damian Hinds]

The Government have done a range of things. Universal credit is completely different from the legacy benefits it replaced, so it does not make sense to make a direct comparison with tax credits. We have to see it in the context of greater help with childcare and the introduction of the national living wage. Of course, the increased income tax personal allowance also means that people get to keep more of what they earn.

Child Poverty

Kate Green Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Westminster Hall

[Dan Jarvis]

The hon. Gentleman tempts me down a road, but I will resist the opportunity to get into that slightly different debate. He may seek to make further points later.

I ask the Government to look at the success being delivered at a local level through programmes such as the Workplace scheme in Newham, which identifies the needs of employers to upskill local residents so they can increase their earnings. Childcare must be more flexible and available when and where parents need it. It is one of the biggest tolls on families’ budgets: the cost of childcare pushes an additional 130,000 children into poverty.

The Government’s forthcoming Green Paper must cover income, child poverty and other structural determinants of children’s chances. It must recognise that childhood is a key stage in everyone’s lifetime, making up a fifth of the average lifespan, so it must be about ensuring a good and nurturing childhood as well as what happens next. I hope the Government will take the opportunity to change course so we do not continue on a path that will see more than 1 million children living in poverty over this decade.

Ever-increasing child poverty is not inevitable; it is the result of political choices. We have seen that before: child poverty rose sharply in the 1980s and peaked in the late 1990s, before falling significantly. The previous Government, who happened to be a Labour Government, showed us how that can be achieved. We should recognise the work of my right hon. Friends the Members for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), for East Ham (Stephen Timms) and for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), and my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), who took the Child Poverty Act 2010 through this House.

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

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this very important debate. Will he acknowledge that one of the reasons why the Labour Government were able to maintain progress was the very precise and well tracked measurements and targeting arrangements, which ensured that when policy was not delivering the required outcomes it was possible to take adjusting action and bring things back on track?

[Dan Jarvis]

My hon. Friend speaks with real authority and experience. I am delighted that she is here to support this debate. She has been incredibly helpful and generous with her time in supporting the work that I have been doing recently. I am very grateful for that point. She is absolutely right. As somebody said to me just the other day, “If it doesn’t get measured, it doesn’t get done.” If we are serious about achieving something, it is important that we set a target.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to refer to the previous Labour Government, who put children first and delivered the biggest improvement in tackling child poverty of any EU nation. In 1997, more children were living in poverty in Britain than in almost any other industrialised nation, but by 2010 we had lifted 1 million children out of poverty. That happened not by accident but because the Government set themselves a target and made achieving it a priority. Investment in higher-quality early years education, childcare and Sure Start centres was expanded fourfold. Support for families was expanded to enable them to enjoy greater control over their lives and greater security in their finances. The tax credit system was introduced and maternity leave was doubled.



We should pay tribute to the leadership of Gordon Brown—I know that will give you particular pleasure, Mr Davies—who legislated for a child poverty target with support from parties across the House. I am reminded of the former Prime Minister’s memorable observation that

“children are 20% of our population but 100% of our future.”

We have a duty to this generation to make progress on addressing child poverty once again, because it should scar our conscience as much as it does our children’s futures.

I genuinely believe that all of us in this Chamber feel that responsibility and want child poverty to fall but, as in life, if the Government want to achieve something, it is useful to set a target. The focus of debate should be what that target is and how it should be met, not the principle of having a target itself. No political party in this House has suggested abolishing all Government targets. As the House of Commons Library noted:

“A target is a clear expression of a policy priority, setting out exactly what the Government wants to have done and by when. Targets let those responsible for delivery know what needs to happen, so that they can plan, monitor and deliver”.

The Library goes on to explain that targets

“allow organisations to be held to account on whether they meet the targets, including by Parliament. They can provide a focus on long-term strategic goals in areas where short-term pressures would otherwise mean that these goals might not be achieved.”

That is why I believe that setting a target can help to realise a common purpose to tackle child poverty that includes communities, employers and government at every level.

My private Member’s Bill provides the House with an opportunity to make that intention clear. It will receive a Second Reading on Friday 3 February and I hope that it earns the support of Government. Parliament has a strong record on working across parties on the issue, most notably in passing the Child Poverty Act 2010, which committed the Government of the day and future ones to take action to eliminate child poverty. With my Bill, I do not seek to be prescriptive about what the target should be. Rather, we should be clear that our goal is that no child should grow up in poverty and that we will measure our progress with a target.

I hope that the Chair has noted my repeated efforts to convey that my private Member’s Bill is not politically motivated. It is too important and too urgent for that. In your constituency, Mr Davies, about one in five children grow up in poverty—3,743 children. Simply put, the present situation is unacceptable and without action what will follow will be worse still. Outside Parliament, consensus is growing that the Government need to do more and quickly.

I take this opportunity to place on record my thanks to those charities and stakeholders that recently attended a round-table event I hosted here in Parliament. We should all recognise the vital work that the sector undertakes every day to help those living in poverty. The Child Poverty Action Group has long campaigned on the issue, and I am proud to have its support for my Bill. Barnardo’s, the Children’s Society, Buttle UK, Gingerbread, the Family and Childcare Trust, Save the Children, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation or JRF, and the Equality Trust all have my profound thanks for their input. I hope that there will be others.

I am happy to meet the Minister or one of her colleagues in the new year to share the extent of support for a target among those who know the most about the issue. It is a concern, however, that the Government have been active in seeking to change how we understand child poverty while also removing a duty to reduce it. The Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016 replaced the reporting obligations of the 2010 Act, bringing in the life chances measures of worklessness and educational attainment. The Child Poverty Commission became the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, and is now just the Social Mobility Commission. In answer to a parliamentary question, we have learned that its crucial work is supported by only seven civil servants, at most, and this week we learned, with some concern, that the child poverty unit has been quietly abolished, without adequate information on that fact being provided to Parliament.

No child poverty target, no child poverty unit, no staff resources and no stated intention to end child poverty—no matter how many children are set to grow up in poverty in the years ahead, we can and must do much better than that. We can see that from projects all over the country, because local communities have not been able to wait for the Government to take action. In my Barnsley constituency, we have a campaign bringing together members of the community and the local council to take action.

As part of the campaign, we asked the public to name just one thing that could make a difference to children locally. Ideas ranged from new requirements to develop affordable housing or to expand childcare, to the great example set by retired teachers lending their expertise to tutor local students. That has informed the ongoing work of Barnsley Council’s anti-poverty board. The campaign brings local partners together to support residents affected by Government spending cuts and welfare reforms. They have been working hard to identify families most in need and to target resources to provide debt advice, information on fuel policy initiatives and healthy eating programmes.

We recently opened a community shop in my constituency. It has agreements with many of the largest food manufacturers in the local area, redistributing good quality surplus products at much more affordable prices.

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

It is a great pleasure to speak in this debate. I pay special tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) for introducing it and for his work on the issue.

Everyone in this House knows why child poverty matters. My hon. Friend explained the reasons: it blights childhoods, damages children’s long-term outcomes and potential in adult life, and brings a heavy cost to society in the loss of skills, in the loss of contribution to our economy and in the cost to our public services of putting right the damage that is done. The experience of child poverty is felt in a number of different dimensions, including children’s educational experience and participation, their physical and emotional health and wellbeing, the quality of the housing and environment in which they live, and the quality of their social and family lives. That was explicitly recognised in the Child Poverty Act 2010, which included an obligation for the Government nationally and for local authorities to bring forward child poverty strategies to address the different dimensions of child poverty. Indeed, I hope those dimensions may be replicated in strategies that our new metropolitan mayors will develop on a larger geographic footprint. I invite those who are putting themselves forward as potential candidates for that office to think about the options and opportunities to develop child poverty strategies for their city areas.

We have had many measures and indices across the broad experience of poverty. I will mention just two. The Labour Government’s “Opportunity for all” included a set of indicators introduced in 1999 that was mysteriously—and, in my view, regrettably—abandoned by the Labour Government some years later. “Opportunity for all” was not focused specifically and exclusively on outcomes for children, but it presented a range of dimensions of poverty, exclusion and disadvantage, which I invite the Government to consider as they reconstruct their approach to measuring and identifying poverty and disadvantage. There was much to commend in “Opportunity for all” and I hope that the Minister is prepared to look at it.

More specifically in relation to children, the excellent UNICEF child wellbeing report card has been produced by the Innocenti Research Centre over recent years. It has looked again at a range of dimensions of child poverty and child wellbeing. What the indices have particularly highlighted and what commentators and researchers have asserted for many years is that, alongside all those different dimensions of poverty, as my hon. Friend has said, it is important for us to recognise that adequate income is key.

Adequate income is key for a number of reasons. Family income and the incomes that children enjoy within their family circumstances can be correlated with a range of other socioeconomic outcomes, over the range of indicators that I described a moment ago. Poor children and children in low-income families, as my hon. Friend has said, suffer poorer educational outcomes, poorer health outcomes and poorer social participation, and less potential is realised in adulthood. It is important, therefore, that we focus on the correlation between low income and a range of other disadvantages.

It is also important to measure income and relative income, as my hon. Friend said, because it is a measure of social participation and a way of ensuring that the poorest in our country do not get left behind as society becomes more prosperous and developed. If we were unwilling to look at a progressive measure of poverty, such as the measure of relative poverty, we would leave families and children behind in the context of social progress. For example, when my grandparents were children, it was considered perfectly acceptable not to have an indoor bathroom, which was not a measure of poverty. In a developed economy such as ours, we would consider that an absolute outrage today.

Relative income poverty is also an aspect of the measurement of equality. There is cross-party concern about the need to narrow inequality gaps. I hope that the Minister will comment on that helpful dimension to tackling inequality.

Measuring income enables us to compare and track our progress internationally. That will be particularly important because the UK, along with other countries, has now signed up to sustainable development goal No. 1 to halve poverty among women, children and men. It will be important for us to have measures of poverty to show our progress against that goal, which applies as much within the UK’s domestic context as it does to the UK’s seeking to eliminate poverty in developing countries around the world through its international aid efforts.

Most importantly, in a market economy such as we live in, income confers choice, dignity, autonomy, and status. It is humiliating—children feel the humiliation—for parents not to have enough money for their children to have the same experiences as their peers. When low-income parents have more money at their disposal, they spend it on things that are good for their children: on fresh fruit, vegetables, educational activities, outings, and on improving the quality of home life through paying off debt and improving the condition of the family home.

It is regrettable that the focus on income poverty that was explicit in the Child Poverty Act—not exclusively the focus of the Act, as some have liked to suggest, but exclusively in the Act—has been removed from statute by the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016, as my hon. Friend said, and replaced by measures in relation to educational attainment and worklessness. Those are, of course, both important to improving family income and addressing family poverty, but, as the majority of poor children are now growing up in working households, focusing on worklessness and not on in-work poverty misses the point and ensures that we overlook the necessary policy change.

As I often hear Ministers say, work should be the best route out of poverty, but too often today it is not. We have an obligation as a society to look after those who cannot work or who perhaps cannot work enough and cannot secure enough from earnings to provide and secure the necessaries for their children.

The Welfare Reform and Work Act has diverted attention from the importance of income, and it is doing so at a time, as my hon. Friend said, when things are about to get a lot worse. In 2017 we will see very acutely the effect of rising prices, particularly for essentials: food and necessaries of the household budget. We will see wages stagnating and both in-work and out-of-work benefits frozen and capped. We will see the effects of the erosion of the value of benefits specifically designed to support parents with the additional cost of raising their children. For example, we have seen the two-child policy, which the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) has rightly campaigned assiduously on over the past year or so.

We have seen the restriction of child benefit and fees are now required to enable single parents to access child maintenance. We have also seen ingrained design faults in universal credit, which affect family poverty. For example, the benefit is designed to disincentivise second earners or lone parents from improving incomes through earnings. It is regrettable that in his autumn statement last month the Chancellor did not address the glaring problem that arises from the insufficiency of the earnings disregard.

The policy measures that have been adopted by the Government to address family incomes, such as the national living wage and the increase in the personal tax threshold, do not adequately address the problem that we have. The national living wage increases have been countered, as I have said, by the failure to maintain the value of in-work benefits, so that, as wages rise, the in-work financial support provided by the benefits system is being more or less commensurately reduced, leaving families pretty much at a standstill as a result. The raising of the personal tax threshold is increasingly a poorly targeted mechanism for supporting the poorest families, including those in paid employment. Most of the benefits of the continuing increases in the tax threshold, Mr Davies, go to better-off earners like you and me.

So what do we need instead of the approach that we have today? First, we need policies that specifically address the incomes of the poorest families. I invite the Minister to look again at the way in which universal credit can be redeveloped to return to its original purpose to incentivise and reward work and increase amounts of paid work. We should reprioritise the financial support specifically designed to meet the needs of parents in raising their children. That means that the restrictions on benefits for children that we have seen in recent years must be reversed. As my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central has rightly said, we need a much more determined strategy of investment in the services and support to help to produce the best long-term outcomes. I strongly endorse the call for a focus on early years childcare and education and for a cross-government approach.

I also support my hon. Friend when he says that we must reinstate meaningful and relevant targeting and tracking of progress. The social justice Green Paper offers Ministers an opportunity to bring forward targets that will focus attention properly on the problem and enable us to assess the efficacy of potential solutions that capture all the dimensions of child poverty, family income and the wider outcomes that we have discussed.

Finally, I suggest we need to underpin our ambitions with clear, firm and focused legislation. I greatly regret the watering down of the Child Poverty Act. As my hon. Friend said, that was put in place with cross-party support. It had support within the Westminster Parliament, in the Parliaments of Scotland and Wales, and across local government. It would be good to return to that consensual approach. If Ministers do not feel that they want to reinstate the Child Poverty Act, which I wish they would, but I fear they may not, may I at least invite the Minister to consider the potential for finally enacting section 1 of the Equality Act 2010? That would bring attention to bear on the wider dimensions of poverty. It could be readily picked up in the social justice Green Paper. I hope the Minister will consider that.

We need a real focus on what works, what makes a difference and how we know we are making progress. We cannot have the pick and mix approach that we have had over the past few years, because times are about to get so much worse for our poorest children. It would be a dereliction of duty on the part of all of us not to take action now to prevent that.

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[Penny Mordaunt]

I am sorry; I would like to make progress, and I do not have much time. I will try to address all the points raised.

It is worth noting that the old Child Poverty Act targets were based on defining a household as being in poverty if its income was below 60% of median household income. That remains the basis for the “households below average income” survey, which is still the definitive source of data on poverty and low income; during the passage of the 2016 Act, the Government made a commitment to continue to publish the data.

I recognise the point made by the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston about some of the obstacles to women in particular working, and working more hours, such as bunching around 16 hours, multiple caring responsibilities and so forth. We recognise that, which is why the Minister of State who holds this portfolio is undertaking a range of work to tackle those issues.

We also know—the evidence is clear—that work is the best way out of poverty. Working-age adults in non-working families are almost four times as likely to be living on a low income. The “Child poverty transitions” report published in June 2015 found that 74% of children in workless families that moved into full employment exited poverty; that 47% of children in workless households were in relative low income before deducting housing costs, compared with only 8% in households in which all adults were working; and that there are 100,000 fewer children in relative low income since 2010.

[Kate Green]

Will the Minister give way?

[Penny Mordaunt]

I am sorry; I want to address these points. The Government’s record on employment speaks for itself. The latest figures show the employment rate at 74.4%, unemployment at an 11-year low and 2.8 million more people in work than in 2010. That is important, because we know that being in work has wider benefits beyond financial ones. There is clear evidence that good-quality work is linked to better physical and mental health and improved wellbeing, and that better parental health is associated with better outcomes for children. That is why we are getting people into employment and working to change attitudes.

We are also introducing reforms to ensure that work always pays and to allow people to keep more of what they earn. We are cutting income tax for more than 30 million people this year and taking 4 million of the lowest-paid people out of income tax completely. By 2018, a typical basic rate taxpayer will pay more than £1,000 less in income tax than in 2010. We are also making sure that people working 30 hours a week on the national minimum wage do not pay any income tax. Together with the introduction of the national living wage, that will give full-time low-paid workers previously on the national minimum wage a pay rise of more than £15 a week. Under universal credit, people are moving into work significantly faster, and staying in those jobs for longer. That crucial welfare reform also increases support for parents; universal credit now provides up to 85% of childcare costs, meaning more support for working families.

The hon. Member for Barnsley Central is quite understandably focused on what happens next. The Prime Minister has set up—and chairs—a new Social Reform Cabinet Committee that brings together nine Government Departments to oversee and agree social policy reforms. Its task will be to lead the Government’s work to increase social mobility and deliver social justice. We will bring forward a social justice Green Paper in the new year that will identify and address the root causes of poverty and will build on the two statutory measures we have already set out in the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016. That is fundamentally different from previous approaches; it is focused on not only the symptoms but the root causes of poverty, and will ensure a clear focus on improving long-term outcomes for the most disadvantaged children.

The Government have a good record on child poverty. There are now 200,000 fewer children in absolute poverty than in 2010 and—under Labour’s own poverty measurements—100,000 fewer children in relative poverty. However, we know that we need to do more. To deliver real social change and real social justice, and to make Britain the country that works for everyone, we will bring forward the social justice Green Paper in the new year. That will say more on our approach to tackling the root causes of poverty and disadvantage. I hope that will be something on which we will be able to build common cause and agree for the common good. Our children deserve that.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kate Green Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

Yes, I would be very happy to give those reassurances. In addition to discretionary payments that can be made through the work coach with the flexible support fund—[Interruption.] Yes, it has always been the case. Those payments are in relation to the costs that people incur from getting into work. As for those other costs that are not directly related to getting into work, we are looking at how we can reduce those outgoings, and there are a number of other national and locally administered schemes that would mitigate those costs. I am very clear that we have to do both things. We have to ensure that someone can endure and cope with the situation in which they find themselves, but we must also bring forward that support in April to enable them to get out of a situation.

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

With around £4 billion of child support debts still outstanding and DWP’s own figures to March this year showing that 90,000 non-resident parents have not paid child support in full, will the Secretary of State tell the House where extra resources can be found to ensure that those parents who are due child maintenance for the care of their children receive it in full and on time?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Welfare Delivery (Caroline Nokes)]

We encourage paying parents to pay their maintenance on time and in full and to avoid the accrual of arrears. However, if a paying parent fails to pay on time, we aim to take immediate action to recover the debt and re-establish compliance. We have a range of strong enforcement powers, including seizing property and commitment to prison. We attempt to re-establish compliance initially through a one-off card payment, or negotiated agreement, deduction from the paying parent’s earnings, or deduction directly from an individual’s bank account. We are currently in the process of responding to a consultation run earlier this year on using powers to deduct from joint bank accounts.

Employment and Support Allowance and Universal Credit

Kate Green Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

I predicted that that intervention was coming, and it is an important point. The pledge was incredibly popular with stakeholders and focused officials’ minds. When I was a Minister, a lot of my work involved lobbying other Departments, so it was helpful when I was able to namecheck the then Prime Minister, as this was his personal pledge. I do not actually recall that press release, as my understanding was that we had not set the date because that was going to be determined in the Green Paper. Personally, I wanted to see significant progress year on year.

One problem with just adopting the approach in the pledge is that the number of disabled people in work could remain static yet in a recession the overall number of people in work could fall, meaning that the gap would close without any more disabled people benefiting. I wanted to set a target such as having 1 million more people in work by a certain date, which would mean that we would know that 1 million more disabled people had benefited. We were due to consult on that as part of the Green Paper process when I was in my ministerial role.

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

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that a single target can be a crude measure, so would it not have been sensible to have had two targets: to halve the disability employment gap by 2020, as the Department appeared to be committed to doing last year; and a numerical target? Does he think the new ministerial team might consider that suggestion?

[Justin Tomlinson]

I think that is twice as good as the current plans—it is a brilliant suggestion. All these targets focus minds, and this one made a difference in terms of pushing. That was a lot of what we had to do. We did not necessarily have all the levers ourselves, so having that target to focus minds makes a significant difference.

Wages have increased by 2.3% this year against the backdrop of an inflation rate of 0.9%—that fell again this week, helping people. We have also extended childcare. Let me briefly talk about universal credit, which will make a significant difference.

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

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson). I pay tribute to him for his work and the commitment that he showed when he was the Minister for Disabled People. I congratulate the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) and thank him for introducing the debate. I also thank the Backbench Business Committee and its Chair for making time for this debate.

I join colleagues in expressing our deep concern about these cuts, which are based on several misconceptions and the effect of which will be cruel and perverse. Everybody wants disabled people and those with long-term health problems who can work to do so, and to have the support to do so. Everyone agrees that those people face additional barriers and may need that additional help.

As we have heard, the Government have published a Green Paper that makes a number of welcome proposals for improving that support for disabled people. I welcome in particular the replacement of the disastrous Work programme with personalised, tailor-made support for disabled people. I welcome the introduction of specialist work coaches, who will support the disability employment advisers in jobcentres, but I regret the fact that the number of disability employment advisers was reduced under the coalition Government. I welcome, too, the introduction of the health and work conversations, although it is a pity that they had to come in several years after the coalition Government prematurely scrapped Labour’s work-focused health-related assessments.

All those additional measures of support are proposed in the Green Paper, but it is none the less surely perverse to cut benefits for disabled people before the support is in place. There is no evidence at all that cutting financial support makes people more likely to move into work. Indeed, investigation by our colleagues in the House of Lords, Lord Low and the Baronesses Meacher and Grey-Thompson, has shown that the opposite is the case. They point out that it becomes more difficult when financial resources are reduced for disabled people to afford training and to undertake volunteering opportunities or work experience that could help them to move towards work. The Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research in 2011 confirmed that cutting benefit for those who are unable to work because of illness does not result in more people moving towards work because it does not address the barriers they face—their health, employer attitudes, availability of suitable jobs, lack of reasonable adjustments or skills gaps—which the Government’s Green Paper acknowledges and seeks to address.

Ministers have said, particularly during proceedings last year on the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016, that an additional £30 a week of benefit disincentivises disabled people from working. There is no evidence at all for that. Indeed, as the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts pointed out, removing the £30 of additional support creates perverse incentives. If someone leaves the ESA to try to find work and they find that it does not work for them, after April 2017, when they reapply for benefit, they will be treated as a new claimant. They will not be able to retain the protection of the additional £30, which existing claimants will retain. Other people are likely to move from the ESA WRAG into the support group, where they will not be expected to look for work at all.

The proposals fail to recognise the nature and purpose of ESA for those in the WRAG. It is an income replacement benefit, in recognition of the fact that those in the WRAG have undergone a work capability assessment that has found that they are currently not fit for work. Employers, in many cases, would not have them in the workplace. Those employers would say that it was not safe to do so. In such circumstances, by definition, an individual cannot derive income from earnings, hence the need for the income replacement benefit. As we have heard several times this afternoon, because of the longer journey to return to work that people with disabilities and health conditions experience, there is a need for additional financial support and a higher rate of benefit.

I would like to say little bit about the support in universal credit for those with limited capability for work. Those people are set to lose out even if they are in work. At the moment, the limited capability for work element and the additional support through the disabled person’s work allowance in universal credit are roughly comparable to the support in tax credits for disabled people working 16 hours a week. If those in work on universal credit lose additional support, they will be substantially worse off than those on tax credits. That is surely a perverse outcome of these cuts that Ministers will want to address.

All such perverse outcomes might have been avoided and the policy improved if an equalities impact assessment had been properly carried out at the time of parliamentary proceedings on the legislation. As we have heard, the Equality and Human Rights Commission offered help with such an assessment and set out a methodology for carrying it out. Regrettably, that suggestion was rejected by the then Government.

[Heidi Allen]

Did the EHRC not offer to do that assessment for free? I seem to remember that it did, such was its wish to contribute.

[Kate Green]

I do not know whether the EHRC offered to do the assessment at no cost, but it certainly set out a substantial and detailed methodology by which the assessment could be carried out. Further, when the Government produced their own rather thin analysis, the EHRC was very clear that it was unsupported by evidence and that it was insufficient.

We now have the Green Paper, which has some welcome proposals and a welcome ambition to halve the disability employment gap, although as my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) pointed out, we do not know when that goal is to be reached. I hope that the Minister will consider the suggestion, which I think the hon. Member for North Swindon supports, that we should consider more than one measure of success in assessing disability employment.

I must tell the Minister that, for all the good in the Green Paper, her proposals will be seriously undermined if she proceeds with the current cut before the proposals have had a chance to take effect. There is no justification for making sick and disabled people poorer. It will not help them to recover, and it will not help them to find work. Disability charities, Opposition MPs and, indeed, MPs from the Minister’s own party have all expressed their deep disquiet about the proposals. It is not too late to think again, to call a pause on this cut and to ensure that disabled people receive the financial support to enable them both to maintain a decent standard and quality of living and, where they can, to have the wherewithal to look for work, prepare for work and take the steps on the journey back to work that so many of them are desperate to make.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

This debate could not be more timely, given that we are a week away from the autumn statement. It speaks volumes that the motion has been supported by Members from nine parties represented in this House. I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) on his persistence in pursuing this issue and on marshalling such broad cross-party support.

As we have heard, Members on both sides of the House know that it is just not right to cut employment and support allowance for sick and disabled people in the work-related activity group by almost £30 a week. It is just not right to cut the corresponding limited capability for work component for those on universal credit. It is especially not right to press ahead with these punitive cuts, which are due to come into effect for new claimants from next April, when the Government have acknowledged that their efforts to address disability employment have failed to date, and their system of employment support for sick and disabled people of working age has been wholly inadequate.

Earlier this month, the Government finally brought forward their long-awaited Green Paper on the disability employment gap, which I have welcomed and we all hope will initiate comprehensive improvements. We have heard a very different tone from Ministers in recent weeks. There have been serious attempts by senior Ministers to distance themselves from their predecessors, not least with the Prime Minister’s early commitment to a

“country that works for everyone”.

They will be judged by their actions, not their words, and that is precisely why we need to hit the pause button on these cuts to ESA and universal credit that will cause hardship and distress to thousands of people who are not fit for work. The exchanges between the hon. Members for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen) and for Twickenham (Dr Mathias) captured this point succinctly when they said that we need to pause to allow the support infrastructure to catch up.

Ministers know that we in the SNP have been deeply critical of the Government’s willingness to allow the most disadvantaged sick and disabled people to bear the brunt of austerity cuts. We will continue to hold them to account for the adverse consequences of their actions—those consequences are already writ large among sick and disabled people in all our communities and constituencies—but I and my colleagues have also tried to be constructive by offering ideas, solutions and better ways forward. We will continue to do that, because it is in everyone’s interest that we get this right.

We should not forget that when these cuts were first announced, the then Chancellor argued that they were intended to remove “perverse incentives” in the system. That point has been made by several hon. Members today. I hope that the new incumbents in the DWP and the Treasury now recognise that taking away necessary financial support from sick and disabled people who have been assessed as unfit for work does not make them get better any more quickly. Quite the reverse: there is a growing body of evidence that poverty exacerbates illness, hinders recovery, and makes it harder for people with long- term conditions to secure and sustain employment.

As we have heard, what is actually perverse is to reduce the resources available for sick and disabled people that enable them to work. I hope the Government will ditch the prejudices and stereotypes that have fed the poor policy decisions of the past, and will listen not only to disabled people and those who represent them, but to MPs on their own Benches who have expressed severe disquiet about the consequences of these cuts.

I am reluctant to break the consensual tone of this debate, but I must respond to the question that the hon. Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) asked my hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts about whether he thought that the Scottish Government should plug the gap, using new devolved powers in Scotland. Unfortunately, the hon. Gentleman has not stayed for the rest of the debate, but I suspect that he knows as well as I do that both ESA and universal credit are not areas of devolved competence. They are fully reserved, despite my best efforts last year, when I tabled and spoke to amendments to the Scotland Bill that would have devolved all working-age benefits. Obviously, we failed to win the backing of the House for those proposals.

It is a wee bit rich for Members to oppose the devolution of those powers yet to demand that the Scottish Government plug the gap. The Scottish Government have already committed an extra £20 million for disability employment support, but they cannot be expected to plug every hole in the bucket of poor Westminster policy making. The hon. Gentleman should take a long, hard look to his own conscience and perhaps his own voting record.

[Kate Green]

As the hon. Lady will remember, my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) pointed out that the Scottish Government were able to provide additional support in relation to the bedroom tax, so it has such a power regarding reserved benefits. His question was: would they use that power in relation to this cut?

[Dr Whiteford]

I thank the hon. Lady for her point, but she should remember that the Scottish Government’s steps to mitigate the bedroom tax have had to be paid for out of money earmarked for our responsibilities in devolved areas. We need to take a responsible approach to make sure that we get this policy right in the long term. We have committed an extra £20 million. I do not know whether she was one of the 20 Labour MPs who marched through the Lobby like the Tories’ little helpers last year to support the fiscal charter on austerity, but as the hon. Member for South Down (Ms Ritchie) pointed out earlier, we would not even be having this discussion if the Labour party had been the effective Opposition it could be. I urge Labour Members to work with all of us on these Benches to stop the austerity that is hurting disabled people, to rise to the occasion, and to be a better and more effective Opposition.

Let me come back to the main point of the debate. I want to highlight a number of reasons why the cuts to ESA WRAG and the universal credit limited capability for work component are harming people and are counterproductive. The first is that ESA should not be considered an equivalent of jobseekers’ allowance. People in the ESA WRAG are assessed as not fit for work, whereas with jobseekers’ allowance, the clue is in the name. However, the key point is that, for the most part, JSA is a short-term benefit. Most claimants come off it in a matter of weeks or months, so it is not designed to support people over long periods. By contrast, ESA is for people with serious health problems and disabilities. It is designed to cover some of the additional costs associated with serious illness and disability, and it recognises the reality that many claimants are likely to be in receipt of the benefit for a longer period—in over half of cases, for more than two years.

In my part of the world, one of the most obvious additional costs is heating for people who are likely to be at home all day, who might not be able to move about so much and who need to keep warm. People on low incomes already spend a huge proportion of their money on essentials such as energy and food. We know from the debt charities referred to earlier that a large proportion of people on ESA are already in debt, running a domestic budget deficit and living from hand to mouth. They have already experienced substantial real-terms cuts to their incomes due to austerity.

Getting by on a low income for a long time is hard. It entrenches poverty among sick and disabled people, who end up using all their savings and eroding their assets over time. Illness and disability also take a heavy financial toll on wider family members, who often find their own earning potential limited because they are providing unpaid care, and who try to support loved ones out of their own limited financial resources.

The Government are quite right to say that the disability employment gap is unacceptable, but they need to recognise that those disabled people who are in work are more likely to be in low-paid jobs and are at higher risk of in-work poverty. They also often move in and out of work more frequently than those who do not have health problems.

Less has been said in the debate about the parts of the motion relating to universal credit. The disabled worker element of working tax credit, which is due to disappear under the shift to universal credit, is the very component that actually makes work pay for many disabled workers. The loss of the limited capability for work element for everyone except those in the support group means that many working disabled people will be around £1,500 a year worse off. That will make it harder for disabled people to sustain employment, and it actively undermines efforts to support sick and disabled people into work.

The Government have pointed out in the past that these cuts will apply only to new claimants, but the reality is that people with serious fluctuating conditions often move in and out of work. That is particularly true of people with persistent and serious mental health conditions, who make up such a large proportion of the ESA case load. The fluctuations of these and other conditions that change over time are often compounded by fluctuations in the labour market and by the trend towards more temporary, fixed-term employment and zero-hours contracts.

The cuts we are debating actually create significant disincentives for those with fluctuating conditions to move into work, because if they do, they become sick again, and if they try to get back into work too early in their recovery and they relapse, they know they will be back on ESA at a significantly reduced rate. That is punitive and counterproductive.

That is at the heart of why we are calling on the Government to hit the brake on these cuts until they have had time to get their act together on the Green Paper and to come forward with more comprehensive and effective support measures for sick and disabled adults of working age. That has been a consistent refrain from Members this afternoon, who have shared moving testimonies from their constituencies.

Cuts to the already low incomes of sick and disabled people who are not fit for work or who are in precarious, low-paid employment are completely unjustifiable. They will damage the health and wellbeing of ordinary people whose lives are already hard enough because of serious health problems. These cuts will push people into deeper poverty and further away from sustainable employment.

The distress and anger of sick and disabled people can be seen and heard in communities across these islands, and those concerns are articulated clearly in the open letters published today. These people are citizens with rights, citizens with needs and people with a contribution to make. It is time that the Government started listening, and I urge them today to do the right thing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Penny Mordaunt]

I am going to make some progress. We offer personal budgeting support for those who are transferring to universal credit. That could include money advice, with a mix of online, telephone and face-to-face support. I am also looking at extending that service and considering what further support I could give.

For the sake of the record, I remind the House that the changes to WRAG due in April next year will not affect those who are already in receipt of ESA and universal credit or the equivalent. Further safeguards mean that they will not lose the extra payment even if they are reassessed after April and placed in the WRAG. I hope that that will reassure the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard), whom I cannot see here, and the two constituents that he mentioned yesterday, Dean and Lauren.

[Kate Green]

Will the Minister give way?

[Penny Mordaunt]

Bear with me. In response to the hon. Lady and my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell), we aim to protect existing claimants who temporarily leave the benefit—for example, to try out work—and who then return. We will introduce draft regulations in due course to set out the detail. Nor will the change affect anyone whose ability to work is significantly limited by their health condition or disability. They will be in the support group or the universal credit equivalent.

On that point, let me recognise the concerns that have been expressed about the binary nature of the work capability assessment and how someone’s fitness to undertake a particular type of work is not an indication of how close to the labour market they might be. We need to take into account several other factors, including their skills, in making that assessment. That is why the Green Paper focuses on the work capability assessment and its reform. I hope that that will be welcomed by all Members, particularly the hon. Members for Strangford (Jim Shannon), for Glasgow East (Natalie McGarry) and for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron), who mentioned it.

We have sought to get people to fit the system rather than to be part of a system that recognises the importance of personalised support. Everyone’s circumstances will be different, as will their multiple challenges.

Improving Lives: Work, Health and Disability Green Paper

Kate Green Excerpts

Monday 31st October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

It is particularly those with mental health conditions who will be helped by the Green Paper, with the more tailored and personalised support. Very often, people with mental health conditions have conditions that come and go, so they may work full time some of the time, part time some of the time and not at all at other times. The changes to benefits—particularly, perhaps, those to statutory sick pay—will make it much easier for such people to stay in touch with work, perhaps working part time for a period. All the evidence suggests that people with mental health conditions are disadvantaged if they are completely detached from the world of work, because their depression may get worse.

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

I really welcome the Green Paper’s suggestion about the personal support package. It should be a significant improvement on the disastrous Work programme, which was a total failure for disabled people. Will the Secretary of State confirm that providers of such support will be adequately rewarded and incentivised to provide good enough support, because that was the difficulty with the Work programme?

[Damian Green]

Yes. I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her supportive words. I hope she will see the personal support package make a difference. I have already mentioned the 200 community partners that will come in, so we will engage the third sector very actively in this process. We will also extend the journey to employment job clubs to 71 Jobcentre Plus areas—those with the highest number of people receiving ESA—so we are trying new ideas in the areas where we think they will particularly make a difference.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kate Green Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

I am happy to try to reassure my hon. Friend about that because she is right. One of the things that has improved in the diagnosis field has been the number of people who have been correctly diagnosed with mental health conditions in recent years, and clearly this is a group who in some cases have particular difficulties in getting back to work. The stress and strain of constant reassessment may well contribute to that, so we are always looking at ways of improving the assessment that we do to make sure that they achieve what they are meant to achieve and do not just act as an increaser of strain on people.

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

Constituents who have been refused employment and support allowance tell me that they are experiencing barriers being put in their way when they apply for mandatory reconsideration of the decision. They tell me that they are being told to put the application in writing and to give reasons in advance, and then if the request is rejected they are not given reasons for the refusal. Will the Secretary of State take a look at this situation because it does seem that there is a deliberate attempt on the part of at least some officials to thwart people in having their cases reconsidered?

[Damian Green]

I am not at all aware of officials actively acting to thwart mandatory reconsideration. As the hon. Lady will know, the Social Security Advisory Committee supported the mandatory reconsideration, but there are a number of recommendations on the table that we are looking at and that will improve the process. With all these processes, there is a need for continuous improvement, and that is what we will seek to do.

Universal Basic Income

Kate Green Excerpts

Wednesday 14th September 2016 Westminster Hall

[Ronnie Cowan]

Absolutely. The aims of this approach are laudable ones and are not something that we, as representatives of the people, should turn our back on.

As a general definition, a universal basic income would be an unconditional basic income given to each individual irrespective of their other income. At this stage, everything else needs to be defined, including what proportion of the welfare system would be replaced by a UBI. We should be sincere in our approach to this issue by saying that its successful implementation would require a revolutionary shift in attitudes towards social security.

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

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. Does he agree that one of the most successful universal payments that we had was child benefit? It was well targeted, it helped with the costs of raising children, it redistributed wealth between families without children and families with children, and—crucially—it was paid to women, which of course improved their children’s prospects. Does he not think that an earlier, simpler and more effective move might be to return to the days of universal child benefit, and to make that the political priority rather than a universal basic income?

[Ronnie Cowan]

I take on board the hon. Lady’s comments. My concern about that idea is that it would entail a change to just one aspect of what we are trying to achieve. It is a very important aspect of what we are trying to achieve, but it would not fulfil the requirements of everybody who relies on welfare.

--- Later in debate ---

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

As ever, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I start by congratulating the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) on securing this debate, which is most welcome and timely. The contributions that we have heard demonstrate that we are in absolute agreement that our current social security system is not fit for purpose. It is not delivering for claimants, who frankly deserve better, in a whole range of different ways. The Minister and I have exchanged views on that in many debates in the past; the detail is there for everybody to review.

Like the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford), I am open-minded on this issue. I want to see the evidence, and it is very early days yet. We know that the current social security system is not delivering, in particular for people in work on low incomes, who might also go from in-work to out-of-work and back into work. The system is not flexible enough. The rapidly changing labour market is not currently catered for by our social security system. The Bank of England’s chief economist, for example, suggests that 15 million jobs are at risk of automation. These are huge changes, which have been growing over the last 20 years or so. Whether or not those jobs will be replaced by new sectors, we have seen a massive change in the labour market, with zero-hour contracts and insecure, low-paid work—our social security system is just not dealing with that. It is not fit for purpose in today’s labour market and there are huge ramifications for how we adapt and develop our social security system to ensure it can properly respond to the rapidly changing circumstances that workers face, and provide them with the necessary security to build happy and fulfilling working lives.

In the light of those great challenges, the Government’s ongoing failure to implement the universal credit programme is of serious concern, and questions about that were again raised last week. Universal credit was meant to attempt to address some of the challenges around flexible working. Unfortunately, because of the way it has been pared back in recent years, as well as the difficulties with implementation—at great public expense—that has just not happened.

[Kate Green]

Would my hon. Friend accept by contrast that Labour’s working tax credit, after initial teething problems, was very effective in reaching low-paid workers, lifting families out of poverty, making work pay and responding to changing work circumstances?

[Debbie Abrahams]

Absolutely. My hon. Friend has, as ever, hit the nail on the head. I am proud of Labour’s record of lifting nearly 1 million children out of poverty as a result of that policy. It is one of which we should be justifiably proud.

We need to respond to the rapidly changing labour market. The Government’s failure to deliver on the heavily diminished universal credit project has led to considerable problems and it is right that we look at the alternatives out there.

There are, of course, different views on what universal basic income is. At its simplest, it is about all of us having a non-contributory, unconditional lump sum, which would be available to all citizens regardless of means. I would like to explore both the positives and negatives. We have already heard some of the positive arguments, such as its simplicity and the way in which it may lift people out of poverty. Currently, there is very poor take-up of income-related benefits across the country. A mere half of those entitled to income-based jobseeker’s allowance are claiming their entitlement. That might have something to do with the current Government’s sanction regime, but it is undoubtedly affecting the numbers of people experiencing poverty in the UK, which now stands at 13 million people. By offering a simple, single sum to all, UBI may go some way to tackling the poverty that so many of our citizens are facing.

In replacing our complex system of universal contributory and means-tested support with a single, simple mechanism, UBI would also allow for a greater simplification of social security administration, with subsequent savings to the Department’s budget. Again, we really need to look at that.

Secondly—this is a really important point—by offering support to everyone regardless of their circumstances, UBI could go a long way to ensuring that the British public retain trust in the social security system. Over the last six years, we have seen the complete erosion of the social security system and the denigration of claimants. Some of the language that has been used—not by the Minister but by some of his colleagues—is frankly shameful.

The recent Fabian Society report, “For Us All”, demonstrated that the Government give as much tax support to people on high incomes through the shadow welfare of tax reliefs as they do to the poorest in our society. It has been suggested that if we were to replace the Government’s tax reliefs for the wealthy with a single universal payment, the reality that social expenditure benefits us all would be much clearer. It would get us away from the Government’s divisive rhetoric of strivers and skivers. Fundamentally, Labour believes that we should value our social security system, which, like our NHS, is based on the principles of inclusion, support and security for all, should any one of us become sick or disabled, or fall on hard times.

Let me focus on some of the concerns. Alongside those arguments in support of UBI, it is clear that tension could arise between its simplicity and its adequacy in supporting people with vastly differing needs and circumstances, which the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan described. A flat rate could not possibly provide the additional costs associated with disability—approximately an additional £500 a month—which are one of the causes of disabled people being twice as likely to be living in poverty. The Government, with their swingeing cuts, have not recognised that. To allow for variations in need, UBI would need to be supplemented with additional top-ups, increasing its expense and complexity, which is where we get to some of the issues discussed earlier.

My final substantial concern is the cost. A recent report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggested that realising the policy would require not only an increase in income but a considerable shift in the general public’s understanding and knowledge of what and whom a social security system is there for. We know from the British social attitudes survey’s time-series analysis that although superficially there are peaks and troughs of support, when people understand what the system is for, whom it is for and the circumstances in which people make claims, they are a lot more supportive of it, so we need to inform people and extend their understanding.

I welcome this debate and I again thank the hon. Member for Inverclyde for securing it. I look forward to further exploring the strengths of UBI, but we must make informed decisions and evidence-based policy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds]

One of the main things that I am in the Chamber to say is that a universal basic income has a number of drawbacks, one of which is the great cost attached. If I may, I will now continue through my remarks.

The Government’s approach to welfare has been about recognising the value and importance of work, making work pay and supporting people into work, while protecting the most vulnerable. A universal basic income goes against every aspect of that approach. Indeed, it would put at risk the huge progress that we have made over the past six years in transforming lives through the power of work. Employment is at a record high. As we announced this morning, there are now 31.77 million people in work.

[Kate Green]

I hope that the Minister, in his analysis of the Government’s track record in relation to paid work, will also address the rise of in-work poverty under this and the previous coalition Government?

[Damian Hinds]

If the hon. Lady will bear with me, the claimant count is close to its lowest for 40 years, unemployment is at the lowest rate for 10 years and pay is rising. Our reforms are working. Why would we put all that at risk by implementing a blunt policy of financial handouts that does not treat people as individual human beings, with their own different ambitions and aspirations? UBI would also make no allowance for those with additional needs—a pure UBI system has no additional payments for those with disabilities or variations in housing costs, as the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) highlighted. Our reforms are about supporting people to reach their full potential, treating them as individual human beings and giving them the opportunity to get on.

Universal credit lies at the heart of the Government’s commitment to reform the welfare state, as the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth, rightly identified. We want a welfare state that is fairer and more affordable, tackling poverty and welfare dependency, while supporting the most vulnerable households. The Government believe that work is the best route out of poverty, which universal credit supports by supporting people into work and by making work, and more work, pay. Together with the rise in the personal tax allowance, investment in childcare and the national living wage, our reforms are ensuring that support goes to those who need it most. There is additional help to cope with essential living costs, such as housing and childcare, and we will ensure that being in work will always pay.

Universal credit is already changing people’s lives for the better. Claimants are moving into work more quickly and staying in work longer than under the legacy system. For every 100 people who would have found employment under the old jobseeker’s allowance system, 113 universal credit claimants will have moved into a job.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Fifth sitting)

Kate Green Excerpts

Thursday 17th September 2015 Public Bill Committees

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

I beg to move amendment 77, in clause 4, page 4, line 33, after paragraph (b) insert—

“(ba) children living in low income working households.”

To require the Secretary of State to include data on children living in low income working households in their report on the life chances of children.

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 78, in clause 4, page 4, line 35, leave out “4” and insert “1, 2, 3 and 4”.

To require the Secretary of State to include data on the educational attainment of children at Key Stages 1, 2, 3 and 4 rather than only at Key Stage 4.

Amendment 79, in clause 4, page 4, line 37, leave out “4” and insert “1, 2, 3 and 4”.

To require the Secretary of State to include data on the educational attainment of disadvantaged children at Key Stages 1, 2, 3 and 4 rather than only at Key Stage 4.

Amendment 80, in clause 4, page 4, line 37, after paragraph (d) insert—

“(e) key health indicators for children in England;

(f) key health indicators for disadvantaged children in England.”.

To require the Secretary of State to include key health indicators in their report on the life chances of children.

Amendment 81, in clause 4, page 5, line 3, after paragraph (f) insert—

“(g) low income”.

A consequential amendment to amendment 77.

Amendment 82, in clause 4, page 5, line 3, after paragraph (f) insert—

“(g) key health indicators”.

A consequential amendment to amendment 80.

[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.

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[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.

[Emily Thornberry]

Sixteen.

[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.

[The Minister for Employment (Priti Patel)]

Good morning, Mr Owen. I thank the hon. Lady for her thoughtful contribution. She said this would be her last sitting, so I would like to thank her for her previous contributions. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] During my short tenure in this role, working alongside her on welfare issues, she has been a valued colleague.

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[Priti Patel]

The hon. Gentleman’s intervention is timely, because I am about to come on to some of those points.

Income-based poverty measures focus only on the symptoms of child poverty while failing to tackle the root causes. Amendment 77 would take us back to when legislation pushed the Government to get families over an arbitrary income line.

[Kate Green]

Amendment 77 does not only specify the measuring of income. It mentions “working households”. That is what we are particularly concerned about.

[Priti Patel]

I recognise that, but I am going to carry on and address some of the points that have been made.

Removing income-related measures and targets and replacing them with new measures on worklessness and educational attainment will incentivise future Governments, as well as this one, to improve children’s life chances. To ensure that we drive the right progress, we should not get distracted by measures that do not tackle the root causes of poverty and should instead focus on measures that do.

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[Priti Patel]

No other country in the world has attempted to use statutory targets to legislate away income-related child poverty. The point that I think came out towards the end of the evidence session was that the Department will continue to publish low-income statistics as part of the households below average income—HBAI—figures anyway, so there is no assumption that we are dismissing the matter or undermining the UK’s international credibility, which I think was the point that the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark was trying to make.

[Kate Green]

The clauses and amendments that we are discussing are not just about publishing data; they are about reporting on the impact of what the data show on children’s life chances. I stress again that amendment 77 relates to

“children living in low income working households.”

The crucial word there is “working”.

[Priti Patel]

Work remains the best route out of poverty. We know that children in workless families are around three times as likely to be in relative low-income as children in families—

--- Later in debate ---

[Priti Patel]

Let me just put things into context. It is not a case of Government assertions. We are committed to reporting and have stated our commitment, in relation to earlier clauses, to report annually to the House of Commons. Perhaps the hon. Lady will allow me to get on to some of my other points about education and life chances. There is clearly a duty and obligation to report and my Department and the Government as a whole will do so in relation to various aspects of the matter. Despite the Labour party’s bluster it does not recognise root causes in addressing poverty and it fails to recognise that work remains the best route out of it. Only the Government have a committed strategy to look at life chances to overcome many of the root causes of poverty, which previous Labour Governments completely ignored.

[Kate Green]

Will the Minister give way?

[Priti Patel]

I will not give way. I am going to make progress. Work remains the best route out of poverty and more people are in work under the present Government. Under the present Government and during the previous Parliament we supported people who were long-term unemployed and far removed from the labour market, and helped them to get into work. Those were predominantly households, families and individuals on low incomes.

There has been progress and we are committed to supporting parents to move into work, increasing their earnings and keeping more of what they earn. Universal credit is one example and our investment in childcare and the future national living wage will all play an important combined role. The new statutory worklessness measures will track the proportion of children in workless and long-term workless households in England. The new statutory measures on educational attainment at the end of key stage 4 will hold the Government to account for their successes in raising the attainment of all pupils in England, and specifically the attainment of those who are disadvantaged.

The importance of early years action has rightly been pointed out, and the Government of course agree about that, which is why every three and four-year old in England and the most disadvantaged 40% of two-year-olds are currently entitled to 570 hours of Government-funded early education a year. We are also committed to extending three and four-year-olds’ entitlement to 30 hours a week. The early years pupil premium has also provided another £50 million in extra funding to early years providers.

[Kate Green]

We welcome those measures. What is the Government’s problem, therefore, about reporting on their efficacy? It should be a good news story for them.

[Priti Patel]

The Department for Work and Pensions will, as I said, continue to publish low income statistics as part of the households below average income report, including statistics on children living in low-income households.

Amendments 78 and 79 would expand the statutory measures to include educational attainment for disadvantaged children at key stages 1, 2, 3 and 4. The amendments seem to underline the significance already placed by the Government on education as an indicator of future life chances, but we do not think it necessary to add those additional measures. Good education, as the Committee fully recognises—points have been made to that effect—is the bedrock on which to promote individuals’ future successes and life chances. At the heart of that we are determined to promote social justice, with the commitment that every child, regardless of background, will be extended opportunities allowing them to fulfil their potential. Raising the educational attainment of all children will increase their capacity to shape their own futures, reducing the risk of future unemployment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Priti Patel]

I have made the point about the reporting mechanisms already, including during this debate. If I may, I will move on to something the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston touched on with regard to the range of life chances measures including key health indicators for children. In England, we also have key health indicators for disadvantaged children.

Amendment 82 is consequent on amendment 80 and requires the Secretary of State to set out in his report what is meant by “key health indicators”. I agree fully with the importance that the amendments would place on children’s health, but the Committee is aware that the Government have already put in place a well-developed reporting framework—the public health outcomes framework—which supports health improvement and protection at all stages of life, especially in early years. The framework includes a large number of indicators on children and young people’s health and, along with the NHS outcomes framework, sets a clear direction for children’s health that allows anyone to hold the Government to account.

The Department of Health has already commissioned University College London’s Institute of Health Equity to produce health inequalities indicators on a regular basis to complement the framework. Those indicators reflect the recommendations of the Marmot review, and profiles will be published for 150 upper-tier local authorities. Our decision to limit our headline statutory measures to worklessness and educational attainment was deliberate and supported by evidence.

[Kate Green]

What evidence supports looking only at key stage 4, given the importance of early years?

[Priti Patel]

I come back to the point that information is already being published. The hon. Lady is welcome to engage with the Department for Education to look at the data and to see how they inform the development of the Bill and the decision that we are taking.

--- Later in debate ---

[Priti Patel]

I would look at this on the basis of a whole Government strategy. This is not about Department versus Department, or Departments working in silos. If the hon. Lady listened to, or even looked at, the detail of what the Government are proposing with their life chances strategy, she would recognise very clearly that this is cross-Government work—the Department for Education, the Department of Health and the Department for Work and Pensions—to focus on the collective root causes of poverty, which cannot be looked at in isolation. It is the Government’s duty to publish data across those Departments and make it available to the public.

Our focus on worklessness and educational attainment is supported by our review, published in 2013. The review makes it clear that educational attainment is the biggest single factor in ensuring that poor children do not end up as poor adults. The evidence in that review shows that long-term worklessness, and the resulting low earnings, is a highly significant factor in trapping children in poverty now. Children in workless families are about three times as likely to be in relative low-income as children in families with at least one person in work. Our new approach regarding life chances, focusing on the root causes, will drive this and future Governments to improve children’s life chances. That is best achieved through a tight focus on work and education, as set out in the life chances measures in clause 4. Therefore, I urge hon. Members to withdraw the amendment.

[Kate Green]

That was a depressing response. The Minister attacked the measure of low income and showed a depressing lack of logic in relation to our arguments in favour of a more rounded reporting of educational attainment at the earlier stages of child development and health. She simply did not in the least—this has been a feature of this Government and their predecessor for every year that they were in power—address poverty in working families.

I accept that the risk of being in poverty is reduced the more parents are able to be in work but, when two thirds of children living below the poverty line do so in a family where somebody is in paid employment, we have to say that the issue of in-work poverty is a serious one. It shows a real paucity of ambition for those families in working poverty that the Minister is so uninterested, not just in reporting on them, but even in addressing the point in this debate. She appears to live in some sort of fantasy land where those families are doing better; in my opening remarks, I pointed to the fact that they are doing worse. I am afraid that, in the light of the Minister’s depressing response, I wish to divide the Committee on amendment 77.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

The Committee proceeded to a Division.

[The Chair]

The Ayes were three, the Noes 11. The Noes have it.

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[Neil Coyle]

We have discussed some of these issues this morning. To be accused of bluster is unfortunate and insensitive when the concern is that an intervention at 16 is far too late. It is unclear exactly what the Government intend to do if they discover—shock horror!—that there are children aged 16 who are educationally disadvantaged. I am fortunate, as the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, to have a constituency where schools are outperforming the national standards, but this is still a massive concern for us. Intervening at the age of 16 is far too late.

I think that those in the sector will conclude that the Government, in failing to accept the amendment, are acknowledging that they have something to hide on the issue, but I will not force the amendment to a vote. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 4 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 5

Social Mobility Commission

[Kate Green]

I beg to move amendment 7, in clause 5, page 5, leave out lines 16 to 27 and insert—

“5 Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission: additional functions

(1) After Section 8A of the Child Poverty Act 2010 insert—”

To leave the name of the “Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission” unchanged.

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 8, in clause 5, page 6, leave out lines 15 and 16.

A consequential amendment to amendment 7 to leave the name of the “Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission” unchanged.

[Kate Green]

Amendments 7 and 8 seek to leave the current name of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission unchanged. We are shocked at the Government’s brass neck in the way that they seek to airbrush child poverty off the statute book and, indeed, to measure and report on it.

The Child Poverty Act 2010, which established the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, was passed with cross-party support. I was not in the House at the time. I was not in the House at the time; I was one of the external campaigners who warmly welcomed that the Conservative party, in particular, was taking such an interest and demonstrating such an understanding of the importance of income poverty.

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[Priti Patel]

I will not give way.

Our reforms will enable the commission to invest all its resources in galvanising effort and improving social mobility. Ultimately, reforming the commission to focus on social mobility will help to ensure that all children can reach their full potential. I urge the hon. Lady to withdraw the amendment.

[Kate Green]

I have no objection or disagreement with the Minister on the importance of addressing social mobility and looking at the drivers of improved social mobility. She simply must accept that around the world the compelling evidence of the importance of income poverty to all other outcomes is unquestioned. This Government will set their face against both that international evidence and their own understanding in 2010.

[Corri Wilson (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (SNP)]

Under the Bill, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission will be renamed the Social Mobility Commission, with a much narrower remit. It will report on progress made towards improving social mobility in the UK, as well as in England.

The Bill is designed to have a limited impact on the current duties of the devolved Administrations. Scotland will continue to be required to produce a child poverty strategy under a duty in a UK Act. Clearly, we will no longer be statutorily bound to report on the income targets, as they are being removed.

Removing income as a measure of poverty ignores the fact that low income impacts on children’s development and wellbeing, including their development in education and their cognitive ability, behaviour and anxiety levels. Child poverty rates that had previously fallen at the beginning of the century are now at risk of being reversed. The IFS projection is that absolute poverty will stand at 3.5 million children before housing costs and 4.7 million after by 2020.

Although worklessness and lack of access to employment are key drivers of poverty, there is no recognition of in-work poverty. Therefore, income has also to be included to ensure the other measures are meaningful and that there is a tangible benchmark. How can this or any Government tackle child poverty if they do not even recognise it exists? The child poverty measurement framework recognises the importance of measuring poverty in consultation with stakeholders such as the Child Poverty Action Group, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Save the Children. It looked at the wide range of factors that can lead to poverty as well as providing an understanding of the impacts of poverty on children and their families.

In addition, the Scottish Government have an ambitious and robust child poverty strategy and host a ministerial advisory group on child poverty, which includes stakeholders from a variety of sectors. On 23 June 2015, Nicola Sturgeon appointed a new, independent adviser on poverty and inequality to help the Scottish Government’s—

[Corri Wilson]

The Scottish Government will investigate a Scottish approach, building on wide support for the poverty measurement framework. We will support Labour to stop the proposals and ensure that the most vulnerable in society are protected.

[Kate Green]

I believe that we will have the opportunity to return to the matter on clause 6, so I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

[Priti Patel]

I beg to move amendment 86, in clause 5, page 5, line 23, leave out from “which” to end of line 24 and insert

“section 5 of the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2015 comes into force.”

This amendment brings the date from which the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission is to be called the Social Mobility Commission into line with the commencement of the other changes to the Commission made by clause 5.

The amendment brings the wording of the provision describing the date from which the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission will be called the Social Mobility Commission in line with the commencement date of clause 5—that is, two months after Royal Assent. This is a purely technical amendment, designed to ensure that the wording of the Bill is consistent.

Amendment 86 agreed to.

Question proposed, That the clause, as amended, stand part of the Bill.

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Other amendments to Child Poverty Act 2010

[Kate Green]

I beg to move amendment 9, in clause 6, page 6, line 18, leave out subsection 1.

Leave child poverty targets and measures unchanged.

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 97, in clause 6, page 6, line 19, at end insert—

‘(1A) In section 2 (Duty of Secretary of State to ensure that targets in sections 3 to 6 are met) for “2020” substitute “2030”.”

This amends the Child Poverty Act 2010 to set new child poverty targets for 2030 rather than 2020. To be read in conjunction with amendment 9.

Amendment 10, in clause 6, page 7, leave out from beginning of line 25 to end of clause.

Leave child poverty targets and measures unchanged.

[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.

[Neil Coyle]

My hon. Friend says that child poverty is flatlining, but for many families, is it not the case that absolute child poverty has risen? That is a particular concern in constituencies such as mine in inner London, and it is linked to in-work poverty.

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend is right, and I shall come to that point, because it leads into something that I shall say about the measures and targets that we use.

The summer Budget and the measures in the Bill will push more families and more children into poverty. We have not yet got an analysis of the impact of the Bill or the Budget on child poverty and on the numbers of children growing up poor. It is disappointing that the Government have not laid that impact assessment before the House. We cannot know for sure what assessment, if any, the Government have made of the impact. We do not know whether they bothered to make such an assessment. From our knowledge, expertise and understanding of what drives poverty, we can expect that the impact will be pretty adverse. We can also look to the very helpful Joseph Rowntree Foundation minimum income standards research, to which I referred earlier. It points to a particularly harsh effect on the family incomes of some particularly vulnerable groups, including single-parent families, couples with several children and families who face high housing costs.

[Hannah Bardell]

I am listening intently to the hon. Lady and I agree with much of what she is saying. Does she agree that the alternative targets proposed are not necessarily related to poverty? Family break-up and drug and alcohol dependency affect families from all income deciles, and problem debt is generally a consequence rather than a cause of poverty.

[Kate Green]

The hon. Lady makes a very good point about the complexity of disentangling causes from consequences and about the fact that Ministers are giving the public distorting messages about what poverty actually is. Let me make this clear: only 4% of parents experience alcohol or drug addiction, and far from all those parents are parents of poor children. Of course, it is devastating for children who grow up in households where parents are addicted, but it is not the same as poverty and it certainly does not explain the 3.7 million children growing up in poverty in the UK today. As she rightly noted, family break-up affects families across the income spectrum. There will be hon. Members in this room who have experienced it in their own families. We should not conflate the two. While it is true that single parents and their children face a higher risk of poverty, there are measures that could be taken to ameliorate and address that consequence, instead of which the Government will make the position of those families worse.

[Neil Coyle]

Is there not a challenge in what the Government are attempting to suggest, in that on the one hand the Minister says their policies on tackling poverty are working but on the other suggests that the measurements, accepted by the Prime Minister when they were introduced, are flawed? Does that not expose the Government’s real agenda, which is to mask their lack of effort in tackling the low-wage economy and in-work poverty?

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend absolutely makes the case.

As we have heard this morning, it is also ridiculous to think that measuring worklessness alone could be a substitute for measuring poverty, when two thirds of poor children are in households where somebody works. We have repeatedly heard from the Conservative party that the measures are somehow flawed or insufficient, so let us go through carefully what the Child Poverty Act actually requires in relation to measurement and targets.

We know that the Institute for Fiscal Studies expects a rise in relative poverty in this Parliament, but it also expects that it is entirely possible that absolute poverty could fall. So there is a two-way street, if you like, built into the cocktail of measures that we have. We have four measures of poverty in the Child Poverty Act: relative income poverty; absolute poverty; material deprivation; and persistent poverty. That addresses some of the concerns that Government Members might rightly have about tracking only one measure. It is right that when median income is falling, relative income poverty alone is not sufficient to give a good picture of what is happening to our poorest families, although it remains important in tracking the gap that exists.

However, it is also right to recognise that we do not look only at relative income poverty in the Child Poverty Act. We look at absolute poverty, persistent poverty and, crucially, material deprivation. Material deprivation gives a real-life test of poverty and the public can engage with it, get their heads round it and understand it. Also, as I said earlier today, it is a particularly good predictor of health outcomes for children.

[Hannah Bardell]

Again, what the hon. Lady says chimes strongly with me. Is she aware that, as indicated by the House of Commons Library, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission warned in 2014 that although levels of child poverty are low by historic standards,

“there is no realistic hope of the child poverty targets being met in 2020, given the likely tax and benefit system in place”?

That was in 2014, before any of these changes were made. Is this not a thinly veiled way of covering up the fact that those targets were never going to be reached?

[Kate Green]

We are certainly not going to reach them under the Government’s current policies; indeed, we will move further away from them. I share the hon. Lady’s scepticism about the Government’s motives, to put it gently. It is really regrettable that, rather than seeking to tackle the problem of poverty, they simply seek to remove it altogether from any understanding of the public policy world.

I hope that the Committee understands that the critique of the Child Poverty Act and its measures and targets as being somehow deficient is completely false. It is also important to understand that the measures the Government proclaim will address poverty are also false, or at least incomplete. As I said earlier this morning, the so-called national living wage will not fully compensate for cuts to benefits and tax credits. What is more, it is highly regrettable that the Government, who are fond of the argument that tax credits are simply a substitute for lower wages, fail to recognise the different functions of pay and tax credits. It is why we have a complex cocktail of policy responses to a set of different drivers of poverty.

Working tax credits compensate for low pay. That means that in households where a family member is low paid, they may derive some benefit from tax credits. Some low-paid people will not do so because they are not in low-paid households; they are the low-paid earner in a household with a high overall household income. So tax credits are a response to low pay, and they help households that suffer low income as a result of low pay to avoid the adverse effects of that low pay.

We should also recognise that the purpose of tax credits for children is not to compensate for low pay or to subsidise employers. It is about sharing among society as a whole the investment that we all have a duty, and indeed an interest, in making in the next generation, who will deliver the future productivity in our economy that will sustain us as we grow old.

We should also remember that while rising pay and an increase in the so-called national living wage are welcome, the national living wage would have to rise very substantially for parents who have no access to any other sources of income—to more than £13 an hour—before their children were lifted out of poverty. Tax credits meet that gap. If it is to be filled entirely by rising wages, that is likely to lead to substantial numbers of job losses, which Ministers would be rightly concerned about.

It is also said that the Child Poverty Act and the measures therein are deficient, because they only look at money. While I strongly contend that money is important, that is also an incorrect analysis of the provisions of the Child Poverty Act. On Second Reading, I particularly sought to draw the House’s attention to that point when I highlighted the fact that written into the Child Poverty Act is a requirement for strategies in relation to child health, children’s education, parental employment, debt—a subject of interest to Government Members—and parenting. Those are all associated with child poverty and provided for in the Child Poverty Act, but they sit alongside the provisions of the Act in relation to measuring relative income poverty and targets for it. They are not the same thing or a substitute.

I am concerned and disappointed by the provisions of clause 6. The clause is cynical and distressing and cheapens the United Kingdom in the eyes of the international community. Most importantly, it means that many of our poor children are at risk of becoming poorer, unobserved. I am frankly shocked at the brazenness of the clause.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar is unable to do so today, with the permission of the Committee I will speak briefly to amendment 97, which was tabled in her name. It addresses the concern that the hon. Member for Livingston pointed out a few moments ago relating to the Government not being on track to meet the 2020 target to eradicate child poverty. That is right, but as Alison Garnham pointed out to us in her oral evidence earlier this week, the Government would not have been completely unable to reach the target in due course. Let us remember that the target, as Ms Garnham pointed out to us, is not to reach zero poverty. A frictional level of poverty will always exist. Families move in and out of poverty, but it might not be sustained if, for example, they quickly return to work. We accept that a reasonable definition of the eradication of child poverty was to reach the best level in Europe—around 10%—which is a realistic target.

The amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar suggests that the target could be reasonably met by 2030, based on the trajectory that we were on before the measures in the summer Budget and the Bill. The argument for keeping the target but extending it over a realistic period is interesting. We are naturally disappointed that, for another 10 years, too many children will grow up poor, but we would rather that we retained the measure and the target in the statute book at least to ensure that there was a mechanism to drive progress forward.

My hon. Friend’s amendment is good, and seeks to give the Government leeway to deal with the difficult challenges that have existed since the 2008 financial crash and with the fact that pay either fell or was frozen in order to sustain people in employment. We recognise that time must be bought to cope with the consequences of the world financial collapse, but it is not right to give up the ambition for this generation or for future generations of children. We want the target to remain on the statute book, and amendment 97 seeks a realistic end date for that target.

Amendment 10 is similar to amendment 9 and merely addresses the same point elsewhere in the Bill.

As many hon. Members will know, I worked for the Child Poverty Action Group before I was elected to the House in 2010, and of all the measures in the Bill this is probably the one that I feel most pained, outraged and angered by. It is a disgrace. It is a disgrace and a shame that will affect our children, and I hope the Government will think again before it is too late.

[Corri Wilson]

I am conscious of the time, so I just want to pick out a few reasons why the SNP oppose the changes. The loss of income targets means that a fundamental driver of poverty—how much money a person has in their pocket—is essentially being deprioritised. Focusing on worklessness ignores the 67% of UK children in poverty who live in a household in which one or more adults are working. That is in-work poverty.

--- Later in debate ---

[Priti Patel]

No, I will not.

We have discussed the flaws and weaknesses of the measures to some extent. Members suggest that we should extend the deadline on the same flawed measures and force future Governments to spend money on tackling symptoms, not the root causes. I recognise that Members will probably press the amendments, but I urge them not to do so.

[Kate Green]

I certainly will not withdraw amendment 9. I feel all the more strongly that it must be pressed to a Division in light of the Minister’s response. She is a very intelligent woman, and I have a great deal of respect for her as a Minister. She is extremely able, but she must know that what she is saying is a disgrace that overlooks the myriad evidence before us and—as I think my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark wished to point out—the position of her own party and the Prime Minister in his lecture in 2006. Her party supported what she now calls a “flawed measure” when it supported the Child Poverty Act in 2010.

If the Minister is going to try to tell me that she now thinks that the Government have had some awakening that was not available to them in 2010, I invite her to present the evidence that was not available in 2010 and is available today. She has not done so. The fact is that these targets are internationally recognised and respected, have been over many decades and were endorsed in the Government’s own consultation in 2013. There is no reason why we should abandon them now.

May I raise two points with the right hon. Lady? First, she says there is a temptation to move people from just below an arbitrary line to just above it. That is not what happened under the Labour Government. We raised incomes in every single income decile. We were ambitious for all of our children, and we remain so today. The idea that having targets or duties does not work is also a completely flawed argument. Conservative Members often like to point out that child poverty rose under Labour. Yes, it did, in one or two years, but I would point out that it doubled under the Conservatives between 1979 and 1997, whereas Labour took a million children out of poverty between 1999 and 2010. However, I accept that it rose in one or two years. As soon as we could see that we were veering off progress towards the target, we took action to bring ourselves back on track. That is the importance of targets. Any Government can make mistakes and any Government can be faced with external circumstances that make progress difficult, but without ambition and without targets to measure that ambition, there is no incentive, requirement or likelihood of action being taken to correct progress as soon as it is right and possible to do so.

I feel this matter very personally, as hon. Members may identify from the way I am speaking in the Committee this afternoon. I will press amendment 9 to a vote. I urge hon. and right hon. Members, in the interests of future generations of children, not to scrap the Child Poverty Act.

[The Chair]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady. It is her last speech in this Committee. I thank her and I am sure we will all miss her.

Question put, That the amendment be made.