Universal Credit

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, I want to make sure that I say the right thing. All I can say is that we are spending over £50 billion on disability, which is a record, and expenditure is going up. We spend over £50 billion a year on benefits to support disabled people and we are proud of that. Spending on people with health conditions is up by more than £7 billion since 2010. As a share of GDP, this is the second highest in the G7.

Almost 3.5 million disabled people are now in employment, which is really fantastic. We want to help as many disabled people as possible into work. They want to work and to be part of the world that they inhabit—that has to be our ultimate goal. But the noble Lord is right: we closed our debate last week with the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, saying that this is a work in progress. I entirely agree with her. It is a work in progress and it will continue to be until rollout in 2022.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I am sure that we are grateful to my noble friend and also glad that she is feeling rather better than she was last week as, clearly, she was labouring under difficulties. We are grateful, too, to the Chancellor for responding, but can my noble friend consider very carefully some of the points that came up last week? I quoted a parish priest, who happens to be a godson of mine, who had written about sanctions and the way they were being administered, to his certain knowledge, in a very deprived urban area of Lancashire. Can we please take very careful note of what people like that say as they have no personal axe to grind but are merely concerned about some of the most deprived people in our communities? Can we listen and try to be continually responsive? This is a good beginning but we still have far to go.

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend. In our debate last week, I remember that he referenced another contact, who said that our work coaches had targets. That is entirely wrong. Let me be clear: we have sanctions. A Work and Pensions Select Committee report in 2015 stated that sanctions are,

“a key element of the mutual obligation that underpins the effectiveness and fairness of the social security system”.

Evidence shows that sanctions have a positive impact on behaviour. This has to be seen in the context of people whose families have for generations not had work in their lives. The Select Committee is right about this issue as over 70% of JSA claimants and over 60% of ESA recipients say that sanctions make it more likely that they will comply with reasonable and agreed requirements.

That is not to say that we ignore those desperately in need. We have a well-established system of hardship payments available as a safeguard if a claimant demonstrates they cannot meet their immediate and most essential needs, including accommodation, heating, food and hygiene, as a result of their sanction. A legislative change came into force on 23 October 2017 to extend the list of JSA vulnerable groups to include homeless people and those with mental health conditions so that they can, if they qualify, receive hardship payments from the first day a sanction is imposed.