Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Kevin Foster Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

The Government have made a commitment to continue to publish the data annually. They have been very clear about that fact. When it comes to the relationship between those measurements and the eradication of child poverty, under the previous Labour Government the number of households where nobody worked doubled and in-work poverty increased: the Government missed their child poverty target by 600,000.

The Bill, as passed by this House, does not redefine poverty to exclude income, as some of its opponents often say. That argument assumes that measuring income is an effective, helpful or comprehensive way of measuring poverty in the first place. It is, in fact, none of those things. In that respect, the 2010 Act was flawed in its approach. The current income measures enshrined in the Act show that the number of children in relative poverty can actually go down in a recession and up in times of growth. That is simply perverse. Furthermore, the measures incentivise what is often known as a “poverty plus a pound” approach, where families can seemingly be moved out of poverty without any change whatever in the underlying factors that got them into the position of low income in the first place. The Act is simply not doing what it is intended to do.

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

It is interesting to hear my hon. Friend’s points. Does he agree that under current measures the only way completely to eliminate relative poverty would be to collapse the economy completely and make absolutely everyone poor?

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

It sounds like my hon. Friend has been reading the Labour party’s manifesto. The 2010 Act is flawed, and in seeking, in effect, to reinstate its provisions, the Lords amendments are similarly found wanting.

Let us look at what the Bill, as passed by this House, actually does in its current format and why their lordships’ amendments are not in my estimation constructive in seeking to reverse these measures. The Bill enshrines in legislation the Government’s commitment to end child poverty and to improve children’s life chances. It focuses on the actions that we know will make the biggest difference to the life chances of children and young people—both now and in the future. We need measures that drive the right action to tackle the root causes of poverty rather than just tackling the symptoms. That is why the Bill introduces the new life chances measures of worklessness and educational attainment.

The Government’s policies in targeting life chances importantly look at outcomes, not inputs—it is a comprehensive approach—recognising that the real route out of poverty is through work, not welfare. Some 74% of previously less well-off, workless families who found work have escaped “the poverty trap”, if one can use that phrase.

The Bill seeks to replace the wholly arbitrary measure that a household is in poverty if its income is below 60% of the median wage. That is totally arbitrary. In a recession, with all households’ income tending to reduce, it gives the completely false impression that fewer households are in poverty because their relative income is seen to rise. It is totally perverse—a recession leading to less poverty. The figures simply do not add up. It is a discredited system, and it did nothing under the previous Government to tackle the underlying root cause of childhood poverty. I therefore submit that these amendments are wrong to try to reinstate that old discredited system. It beggars belief that some people believe that we can base our strategy for improving children’s life chances on income measures that would suggest that the last recession somehow caused a significant fall in child poverty. Of course we should not do so, but that would be the effect of the Lords amendments if this House accepts them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Goodman]

I begin by addressing amendment 1. The Labour Government had four poverty measures when we took through the Child Poverty Act 2010—absolute, relative and persistent poverty and material deprivation. We measured all of them. Between 1997 and 2010 we cut the number of children living in relative poverty by 1 million, and the number of children living in absolute poverty by 2 million. There is nothing arbitrary about this. It is important to have those measures because they are used across the OECD. That enables us to compare our performance with that of the other countries that UNICEF studies.

Ministers want to abandon those targets because they intend to freeze benefits and cut child tax credits if there are more than three, four or five children in a family. Those measures will increase the number of children living in poverty. Because they do not want that to be evident to the whole world, they do not want to use the targets. We should not let them off the hook.

We all think life chances matter. We are all interested in the correlations between the kind of childhood people have and what happens to them later in life. No one is saying that we do not want to measure those things, but I remind the House that not being able to go on a school trip, never having a holiday, not having a birthday party—these things matter in themselves because children are not human becomings, but human beings. Childhood is a part of life. The quality of life in the early years matters just as much as it matters what our lives are like or what the quality of our parents’ life is like.

On amendments 8 and 9, I want to bring into the House the voice of the people affected. Those in the ESA support group are not people who are not working out of perversity or because they have not done the arithmetic and do not know what the incentives are. They are not in work because the jobs do not exist, or because of the barriers to work. They may have problems with transport, they may be stressed, they may be exhausted or they may be struggling against extremely difficult odds. In my constituency there are 860 people in the ESA work-related activity group. I get letters from them and have meetings with them every single week.

This week I heard from a woman who wrote:

“My husband…has been in receipt of ESA-Support Group benefit…for some considerable time due to long standing health problems of both a physical and psychological nature. He has recently had to resubmit the…questionnaire and we have just had notification that he has been placed in the Support Group but this will only be until November…His last award was for three years.

Considering the…letter from the GP”—

and the psychologist—

“we can’t believe the DWP think it is in any way appropriate to put my husband through this process twice within the same year…He will now spend…months worrying and becoming increasingly anxious about having to face the process again”.

She adds that he is “extremely vulnerable”. Treating this group of people in that way is not helpful. Making them poorer, not helping them to heat their homes or to eat properly, and making them anxious about whether they can pay their rent is not helpful.

The week before I received that letter, I had a letter from another constituent, who said:

“I’m petrified. Atos did my ESA medical...yet they still lied. I’d told them my disabilities and…they didn’t mention any of them…I was called by a woman from the DWP who told me my ESA was cancelled. She seemed happy (really happy) to gloat about this…I had to live on my 9 year old daughter’s £20 child benefit and child tax credit for 4 weeks. It takes a split second to stop benefits but 4 weeks to reinstate.”

She has now been told she must provide her own medical records, which will cost £500 because doctors are charging to provide them. She continues:

“I can’t afford this on £102 a week…I’ve not slept in ages”.

She adds that she has “cried a lot” because she knows what will happen to her.

That is the situation people are already in, and we absolutely cannot see them pushed down even further. I appeal to the Minister’s better nature. I appeal to her to think again about amendments 8 and 9.

[Kevin Foster]

It has been an interesting debate so far. The Opposition contribution that was of most interest to me was probably that of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field), and it is a pity that others did not take a lead from him.

Let me start with the measures of child poverty. Using measures of relative income as the main driver can have some bizarre impacts. For example, we focus on those just under the line, not those who are most in need or most desperate, and we try to get them over the line to make the numbers work. As I touched on in an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones), that approach can inspire the view that making the whole of society poorer will end relative poverty, even though no one is better off. As we heard, the bizarre outcome is that a recession is, in theory, the best news when it comes to reducing child poverty, whereas, in a boom, things would be the other way round.

That is why it is right to focus on creating real life chances. I speak as someone whose mother grew up on a council estate and whose father worked for 37 years in Devonport dockyard—he had to work hard with his hands to get what he could for his family. That is important: this is about social mobility and achievements such as those.

A Scottish National party Member noted in an intervention that it makes sense to measure these things not just at 16, but all the way through education. There is perhaps more work to be done, therefore, and I look forward to what the taskforce says, but it is important to look at what our education system turns out at the end of the day. One example that has been given is that, a few years back, more children came out of Eton with three As at A-level, allowing them to get to top universities, than came out of the entire cohort of children on free school meals in England. That really is a thought-provoking point. We may disagree about how best to tackle it, but it is certainly no great compliment to our system.

Employers with jobs want people with skills. They want to employ people and to put them into high-paid job. However, they find that people just do not have the skills or the ability to take those jobs up. That is where educational outcomes have an impact on life outcomes and on whether people stay in poverty. If people do not have the skills to move into employment, that opportunity is not there. That is why looking at the life chances side is so important in tackling poverty and preventing people from being locked into a cycle, with parents being in a low-paid job, children going into a low-paid job and grand-children going into a low-paid job.