Disability Action Plan

Layla Moran Excerpts

Monday 5th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mims Davies]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for the point he makes. Of course, we in our Department deal with some very vulnerable people in very difficult situations, but this is a time of 30-plus actions and some changes that are extremely positive. We have made sure that we have put safeguarding at the heart of what we do, and I will write to him specifically about that matter.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

The Botley Road in Oxford has been closed for nearly a year, with another six months to go. While that is an inconvenience for residents, for our disabled residents it has been an absolute blight on their lives. The one thing that was put in place for them has been reduced to just one hour in the day, and they have felt completely left out, while some have not even left their homes. Will this plan include provisions for local residents affected by infrastructure projects—in this case, run by Network Rail, which is making the decisions—because I cannot see where that is included in the plan?

Oral Answers to Questions

Layla Moran Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[David Rutley]

Absolutely. It is pivotal that we get the plan for jobs working, along with local councils, local enterprise partnerships, hard-working Mayors and businesses. That is what we are seeing in Teesside, which is setting a great example for the rest of the country.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

2. Whether she has made an assessment of the effect of ending the £20 universal credit uplift on trends in the level of homelessness.

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

8. What assessment she has made of the impact of removing the £20 uplift to the standard allowance of universal credit on household budgets.

--- Later in debate ---

[Layla Moran]

Charities warned that the cut to universal credit would risk 100,000 people falling into homelessness, yet the Government ploughed on with it. Added to that is the freeze to housing benefits, with the result that more families cannot afford their rent and risk losing the roof over their head, and the fact that the Government have yet to repeal the Vagrancy Act 1824, meaning that the very same people who are being made homeless could then become criminalised. Can the Secretary of State tell us how many people she expects to fall into homelessness, and what the Government are going to do about it?

[Dr Coffey]

We have provided £140 million of discretionary housing payments to councils, specifically to target that element. We boosted the local housing allowance in the covid Budget of 2020, and we have kept it at that rate. As the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (David Rutley), has just said, there has been a significant investment of about £2.5 billion in both increasing the work allowance and reducing the taper rate. My work coaches across the country are helping people to get into work day in, day out.

Oral Answers to Questions

Layla Moran Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Coffey]

First, I congratulate the hon. Lady on her new role; I understand that she is moving into the shadow Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy team and I am sure that she will be a huge success there, too.

In terms of kickstart, in the last four weeks, we have achieved, on average, 400 starts a day. This is in line with what we are seeing with the opening up of the economy. Today, we are on the first element of step 3, and we expect the starts under kickstart to get going. On the plan for jobs, we want to make sure that we properly evaluate all the measures to make sure that they achieve the ultimate goal of ensuring that as many people as possible are in work by the end of this year.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

What recent estimate she has made of the number of (a) successful and (b) total applications to the kickstart scheme in the Thames Valley region.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mims Davies)]

I can confirm that, as of 6 May, around 12,300 kickstart jobs had been made available for young people to apply for in the south-east of England region, and around 2,300 young people had already started in their new kickstart roles. Delivering the kickstart scheme at pace means that the DWP deal is still developing the tools to further break down the data on a more local level.

[Layla Moran [V]]

I thank the Minister for her answer. I agree that helping young people to get into work through this crisis is of paramount importance, but I was deeply concerned to hear, in a business roundtable organised by our local enterprise partnership, that that data is being gathered only at a regional level by the DWP. This means that the LEP and the councils cannot assess how well Oxfordshire is doing or measure the efficiency of any interventions that we might put in place to do even better. I thank her for her explanation, but can she give us any timeline on when we can have this data broken down to at least upper-tier council level? And can she meet me and officials so that we can understand how to ensure that young people make the most of this scheme?

[Mims Davies]

I thank the hon. Lady for raising the issue of getting young people into work. As we heard from the Secretary of State, approximately 400 young people, on average, have been going into work per day for the past four weeks. I urge her to meet the Rose Hill youth hub, the newly launched DWP youth hub that covers her constituency and has been working with Oxford Jobcentre Plus from April, as well as Aspire, Activate and Oxford City Council. That will give her the insight that she needs about what is happening on the ground. She can also meet the local youth employability work coaches. We are breaking down the data as far as we can, but our priority right now is to get young people into those new roles.

Universal Credit Fraud

Layla Moran Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

This is in relation specifically to the cases of fraud relating to advance payments. I understand the point that the hon. Lady raises, and as ever we will continue to consider all our operational activities to ensure that we continue to deliver much-needed improvements.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

The bit about this that I find most difficult is that the whistleblowers were themselves jobcentre staff. What does it say about the culture in the DWP that they felt that they could not come to the Department and had to go to the BBC? My question is simple: did the Department know about any of this or any of these cases before the BBC revealed them, and if so, what did it do about it?

[Justin Tomlinson]

Yes, of course we did. That is why we have created a team of 120 dedicated members of staff specifically looking at the area of advance payments, why we have been improving training and awareness for both claimants and our frontline staff, why we are working with Action Fraud on our communications strategy and why, rightly, we are using the full force of the law to undertake prosecutions against the parasites who are targeting some of the most vulnerable people in society.

Department for Education

Layla Moran Excerpts

Tuesday 26th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I would like to put on the record my thanks to the Backbench Business Committee, the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), who leads the Public Accounts Committee so well, and the National Audit Office. It is fair to say that I rely heavily on the reports the NAO produces and I think it does a wonderful job. I would also like to give a shout out to Botley Primary School—I am a governor—because it got the call from Ofsted yesterday and is in the thick of it. Given that the first thing I am going to talk about is Ofsted, it would be fair to wish the school good luck today. I know they will do us all very proud.

As governors, we focus heavily on school funding. In my local area, a school recently wrote to parents to ask for pencils and pens because it cannot afford them. Another school—I will not mention which one—is consulting, quietly and behind the scenes, on going down to a four-day week, because it cannot afford to keep its teachers at full-time level; if it did, it would have to start going into severe deficits. In the context of the estimates, what we want to know is this: if there are funding pressures, are they affecting outcomes? In the end, that is what it is about. Are they affecting outcomes? Are they driving value for money or not? What are the outcomes of the policy decisions themselves? Today is about not party political speeches, but looking at the evidence in front of us.

The Public Accounts Committee has been looking at a whole host of issues, including school accountability and governance. When, with the Department for Education, governors and parents, we have explored where the buck stops on school accountability, the picture is, unfortunately, quite muddled. No one can tell us empirically where the buck is meant to stop. The Department for Education says that it is up to the multi-academy trusts or local authorities, who say that it is down to the governors, who rely very heavily on Ofsted to be able to say whether or not these funding pressures are leading to lower or higher outcomes. In fact, I think Amanda Spielman slightly overstepped her initial remit—but quite rightly—in saying that there are definitely outcome failures in the FE sector as a result of the financial pressures that many Members have mentioned today. She said that we do not empirically know whether that is happening in schools or not, but our argument is that if we had the proper data, we could probably get a better idea of what is going on.

This is at a time when Ofsted’s own budget is under pressure. Its remit has expanded significantly since 2000, with successive Governments of all colours having asked it to do more and more. As well as schools, its remit now covers other sectors including children’s social care, early years and childcare, further education and skills providers. Meanwhile, its budget has had a decrease—a cut—of 40%. I will go on to talk about more things that I wish Ofsted would do, but the better question may be: what is our mechanism for school improvement and accountability? Is Ofsted the right provider to be able to do this? I know that the Department is consulting on the new Ofsted inspection framework, which we absolutely welcome, but as part of that, we need to carefully consider whether introducing even more into Ofsted’s budget is the right thing to do or whether it is time to have another body altogether.

Passing the buck is more than just a financial matter and more than just about data and numbers; it is also a matter for the community and its parents. One of the more striking sessions in the Public Accounts Committee was when we had campaigners from Whitehaven Academy, whose community shouted from the rooftops about the financial mismanagement and irregularities that were happening in that school. One of the questions that we asked was, “What does it take to get these things looked at?” It took two MPs of different parties, one of whom was forcibly removed from the premises when they visited the school. There was a “Panorama” investigation and we still do not fully know the outcome of what has happened in Whitehaven. This continues to drag on and my Twitter feed is full of parents who are shouting yet again from the rooftops, “Where does the buck stop?”

Meanwhile, we have the Durand Academy, whose school was transferred to the Dunraven Educational Trust. The first canaries in this case were back in 2014. The Public Accounts Committee had a hearing on this issue in January 2015 and in it identified a

“lack of clarity about who ultimately owned assets”,

governance arrangements that were “overly complex and opaque”, a

“lack of effective timely intervention by the”

Department for Education and the FSA, and that the

“lack of an appropriate fit and proper persons test”,

had allowed directors to run the trust who developed “inappropriate business interests”. How on earth did it take until August 2018 for the funding to finally be cut? It is extraordinary.

Our argument is that this is partly because we now have a muddled twin-track system of schooling, where there are local authority-maintained schools of the older style with this new academies system. It has really been only this year—the first time was last year, and now this year—that we have seen the accounts, so that we can properly assess how this system is working alongside the other. We know, for example, that it takes a certain amount of money to convert schools into academies. In fact, in 2017-18 the Department for Education spent £59 million on conversion and re-brokering, but what about the extra costs to local authorities in doing that? What about the hollowing out of local authorities’ ability to support maintained schools? That was an area that the Public Accounts Committee was concerned about. It is an example of cost-shunting by removing an aspect of the system in one part of schools. As far as kids are concerned, they do not care whether they are in academies, free schools or maintained schools.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

In my constituency, schools are now almost completely responsible for funding support services. Currently, local schools are covering a shortfall of £2.3 million for higher needs schools. Does my hon. Friend agree that this represents a total failure of the Government to invest in the future of our children?

[Layla Moran]

Indeed, we have heard about the higher needs block; that is yet another area where there is cost-shunting.

On the twin-track system, what we need to do is look beyond: is one system better than the other? Actually, we have a lot to learn from the sorts of innovations that we are seeing in schools, but I am not convinced from the evidence we have seen in the Public Accounts Committee that we have a handle on the data. In our recommendations to the Department we have asked it to look at, for example, different types of multi-academy trusts—is there a difference between those that are locally based and those that are spread out or between the rural and the urban? Is there a north-south divide when it comes to academy trusts? What can we learn from the data? At the moment, when the accounts are produced, we do not have that data.

I very much echo what the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) was saying earlier. I firmly believe that this is not just a question of more money for schools. More money is welcome to get them working as they hope to now, but the issue is also about driving efficiency and spreading best practice. Without the data, how will we know what is working best?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. I gently remind colleagues that if they are going to intervene, it is important that they should have been in the Chamber for the whole speech and a little bit of the debate as well.

Oral Answers to Questions

Layla Moran Excerpts

Monday 11th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

It is always pleasing to see a happy Member. The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) is convulsed with mirth. She is in a state of almost uncontrollable hysteria. Well, I hope she is very happy. I do not know what it is that has amused her, but it is good to know that she is a happy spirit in the Chamber.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

T3. Oxford & District Action on Child Poverty recently met me to discuss the devastating impact of the two-child limit on working families in Oxford. It said, “You literally could not have designed a better policy to increase child poverty than this one,” with estimates suggesting that over a quarter of a million children will be pushed into poverty as a result. Will the Minister listen and not just tweak, but scrap this punitive policy in its entirety?

[Amber Rudd]

This was a policy that was introduced and voted on in the House in 2012. It is right that some people who are paid very low wages and are paying taxes should not have to pay for other people to make different life choices that they feel they cannot afford. The hon. Lady is probably aware—I hope she is—that we changed the retrospective nature of that policy to ensure that families who were already in existence before 2012 were not adversely affected by it. I think that is the right balance.

Oral Answers to Questions

Layla Moran Excerpts

Monday 19th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

We are looking very carefully at all of the ways that we can make sure care leavers have the same opportunities that others take for granted. For example, through second chance learning, care leavers aged 18 to 22 are still able to access full benefits while having a second opportunity to learn. There is the £1,000 bursary for those who choose an apprenticeship, and the £2,000 bursary for those who choose higher education.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

5. What steps she is taking to measure progress on her Department’s objective of getting 200,000 more people into work through universal credit.

[The Minister for Employment (Alok Sharma)]

Under the universal credit business case, we expect universal credit to deliver an economic benefit of £8 billion a year in steady state, and result in 200,000 more people moving into work. We published a labour market evaluation strategy on 8 June, setting out how these impacts will be measured.

[Layla Moran]

I thank the Minister for his answer, but a recent Public Accounts Committee report on universal credit found that the Department, as it has in fact admitted, cannot empirically measure the number of people who are going back to work. I welcome the new Secretary of State to her place, but may I encourage her to read this report? How on earth, if the data are not reliable, can we meaningfully achieve any kind of target?

[Alok Sharma]

I encourage the hon. Lady to look at the document we have published about what we will be doing to measure this number. However, I also point her to the record levels of employment: the fact that there are more people in work in the economy right now than ever before, and that unemployment is at a 43-year record low. Jobs are being created and people are moving into work, and that is largely due to the welfare reforms that we have introduced.

Oral Answers to Questions

Layla Moran Excerpts

Monday 21st May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Newton]

I appreciate the hon. Lady bringing up that really important case. We will take it away and get back to her.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

T1. If she will make a statement on her departmental responsibilities.

[The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Ms Esther McVey)]

Further to our discussions in this House regarding Motability and my promise to seek a National Audit Office inquiry into it, I am pleased to announce that agreement has been reached and that the NAO will begin its inquiry into Motability.

[Layla Moran]

I have a young constituent who has PKU, a rare inherited disorder that requires a strict diet and treatment for life. She had been in receipt of the disability living allowance, but now that she has turned 16, she has scored zero in every personal independence payment category. Will the Minister meet my constituent and me so that we can iron out this clear case of “the computer says no”?

[Sarah Newton]

I would be absolutely delighted to meet the hon. Lady and to go through this constituency case with her.

Universal Credit

Layla Moran Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, in which I wish to focus my remarks on childcare and free school meals.

I put on record that the Liberal Democrats are proud of the role that we played in the coalition Government to secure a generous tax-free offer on childcare that helps many families. Although it is true that it will extend to more families, it is also true that many others will be left out. That was never the intention. Many parents—particularly those with older children, lower childcare costs or lower incomes—will find themselves worse off under tax-free childcare than they would have been with childcare vouchers. It is unfair to close the scheme to new entrants, particularly because, unsurprisingly, the information about the closure of the scheme has not been spread as far and wide as it could have been. I urge all those parents who are listening to the debate—I am sure that there are many—to do their research before April, so that they can decide what is best for their families. All we are suggesting is that tax-free childcare and childcare vouchers are kept open concurrently, so that we can provide maximum flexibility for families. Surely, the Government would agree that that would be a good thing.

I hope that the whole House will join me in paying tribute to the former Liberal Democrat Ministers David Laws and Sarah Teather for battling to secure universal free school meals for all children in key stage 1. Soon after I was elected, I visited West Oxford Community Primary School and had the pleasure of meeting the catering manager. She told me that, despite being sceptical of the policy initially, she now thinks it is brilliant. She took great pride in telling me of a boy from a deprived background who did not eat much veg at home because it is quite expensive. Slowly—slowly—she got him to love broccoli.

I am a primary school governor, and the teachers at the school are absolutely clear—this is backed up by the evidence—that universal free school meals are beneficial for learning and attainment and help all children. The Government like to nick Liberal Democrat policies—including same-sex marriage, the pupil premium and lifting the income tax threshold, as we heard in the spring statement earlier—and I am not precious, so they can have another one: extend free school meals to all children in primary schools. If not that, they could at least extend them to all children on universal credit.

Unlike under tax credits, universal credit creates an absurd situation wherein a single-parent household on the national living wage will have to work eight more hours to make it work. Surely, that is not what the Government intended. Linked to that, of course, is the fact that the number of children on free school meals will affect the pupil premium. I posit that that is the reason why the Government will not roll out free school meals to all children on universal credit—because, yes, it would be prohibitively expensive and would stop the targeting of the pupil premium.

May I suggest to the Secretary of State that, to sort that out, just decouple them? They are, in their own right, worthy policies. They are policies that are working and there is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. May I urge the Government to think again on free school meals and to think again on closing the childcare voucher scheme?

Universal Credit Roll-out

Layla Moran Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Frank Field]

I am anxious that everybody gets in, so may I move on? I have real affection for people who have fought the battle hard on this, but I wish to pursue the matter. Four constituents of mine have had their claims closed down, with the only too imaginable consequences of what it has meant for their lives. The landlord of one of them has said, “I do not want to evict the tenant, however I might be left with no choice.” That tenant has said, “I am behind with not only my rent, but my council tax. All I’ve got to live off is child benefit. The school has been so worried about the welfare of my son that my sister offered to take him in to her household so that he was not taken into care.”

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

rose—

[Frank Field]

I might give way a little later, but I want everybody to have a chance to speak.

Let us examine how sanctions apply in this system. I wish to give one example of a lad who, after huge difficulty, got a part-time job. We must consider the pride that came with that job; he was walking out in the morning knowing that at end of the week he was going to bring a wage packet back. I point out that this is at the end of the week, Minister, not the end of four weeks or six. There was a transformation in him, but the jobcentre decided that he was not trying hard enough to get a better job, so they sanctioned him and took his money away. He then could not exist on the money from his job. He now has no money and is well on his way to destitution.

So my third theme is: what is the national impact of this slow motion crash for us, but high-speed crash for our constituents? What has the Trussell Trust told us about the impact around the country of this roll-out of universal credit? We must remember that the Trussell Trust is the “trade union”, so to speak, of only half our food banks. It reports that it needs 1,500 additional tonnes of food for the coming year in any case, but that it will need an additional 2,000 tonnes to take on the consequences now of UC. As I have said, in Birkenhead we will need 15 tonnes of food in the coming year. We knew that this, for us, evolving slow crash, coming up over weeks, was going to happen, but in Birkenhead it actually began yesterday.

That is why the Select Committee, of one mind, on the evidence that it received, said that the most important thing the Government could do, of the many things it could do—this was the one thing that stood out from our evidence and we wanted them to do it as quickly as possible—was to reduce the wait from a maximum of six weeks to a maximum of four weeks. The first 133 submissions to the Select Committee told us that the six-week wait is the main force pushing people to having no food, risking everything and the brink of destitution. It is not a surprise, is it, Minister, given that the data from your old Department, the Treasury, tell us that more than half of low-income and middle-income families have no savings at all to fall back on? Two thirds of us have less than a month’s savings to tide us over a crisis.

Let us consider the very idea that these families—the most vulnerable people that we have the honour to represent in this House—can wait for six weeks. In the cold light of day, one wonders how any decent set of people—[Interruption.] The great architect of this reform is not in this place, although he was here earlier—I refer to the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith). Could he ever have really wanted this result for this reform? I hope he is going to come back and tell us that when he failed to fend off cuts from the previous Chancellor of the Exchequer he could never have envisaged that this reform of noble intent should end in these personal nightmares for our constituents.

The Select Committee does not yet have evidence on this—we may get the evidence to persuade us to publish a united report—but for me there seem to be five obvious reforms that we need to build into universal credit, in addition to that four-week wait. First, if Scotland can have two-weekly payments, why cannot England? Northern Ireland is going to get payments every two weeks; why cannot Wales? I thank Scotland for negotiating a subcontracted agreement to show that what was thought to be impossible is indeed possible, once due pressure is applied. I offer huge thanks for that.

Secondly, we want rents to be paid directly to landlords, if people wish.

Thirdly, we want the DWP automatically to tell local authorities and housing associations that their tenants will be pushed into debt. I do not think that is our or the citizens advice bureaux’ job; it is the Department’s job.

Fourthly, under the current system babies and toddlers are going without Healthy Start vouchers and children are going without free school meals because the data that was previously held separately and could be given to local authorities is now held in the universal credit system and not given to local authorities. Can that terrible nonsense please come to an end?

Lastly, my colleagues and I had a fight when the Government removed from the statute book the duty of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to promote claimants’ welfare. The Government said that it was not necessary and that they were tidying up the statute book—“We’re all in favour. Who could possibly be against promoting the welfare of claimants?” My argument was that if it is so unnecessary, let us just leave it on the statute book, in case. The current sanctions policy could never, ever have worked if that duty on the Secretary of State had existed, because the Secretary of State delegates to every person who works in DWP offices, and they would have to carry out that discretion on the Secretary of State’s behalf.

The House knows that I was as tough as old boots on the need for sanctions—people should have to abide by the rules—but the idea that we have sanctions without anybody in the office being able to exercise discretion is appalling. Imagine being an officer to whom somebody says, “You can ring the hospital and find I was actually on the operating table when you wanted me here for an interview. Please don’t sanction me!”, but the sanction is applied automatically because there is no discretion. That should end.

I plead with the unbelievably decent Minister for Employment: I want those mutterings of his—when he says that he is appalled, that this does not need to happen and that he can explain why it is not going to happen—to be on the record when he replies. I also ask this of Ministers on the Treasury Bench for the fifth time: the Government tell me that the roll-out of universal credit in Birkenhead is going hunky-dory—that all the things I have tried to represent and all the pleas from the food bank to raise 15 tonnes more food is scaremongering—so will the Minister say whether the Government are still as confident as they were when I first asked the question many months ahead of the roll-out? Or should I go home and roll up my sleeves with those at the food bank who are trying to collect 15 tonnes more food to prevent families from being engulfed, this Christmas and beyond, by hunger of undue proportions? This is a national scandal that the Government could stop. Will they stop it, please?