Working-age Benefits

Lord Elton Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, I recognise, first, the depth of my ignorance of this subject compared with those who have spoken and those on the Front Bench. Secondly, I recognise what was established very well in the debate last week on the report from the noble Lord, Lord Farmer: namely, that the family is an essential building block in a stable society and that what you want in the family is stability. I am well aware that children in families perform better in school, have longer lives and so on.

On the point of longer lives, the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, touched on a very tender point when he referred to the reduction in expectation of life mile by mile as he approached the ward or borough that he represents. At 87, that speaks to me very loudly. I feel that I am extraordinarily lucky and I recognise the misfortune of those with short lives much more clearly that I would have done 20 or even 50 years ago.

I therefore speak with a tender conscience. It is tender also, as I say, because I am largely ignorant of the field—but there are certain simple, salient facts. As I said, there is the fact that families produce stability. There is also the fact that families are in great difficulty in various percentiles of our income spectrum—if that is the right language. I realise that an across-the-board mitigation of the policy that was established by the freezing benefits would be hugely expensive. This is not necessarily something that any Government could contemplate at this stage of the economic cycle and the budget cycle. Equally, this Government are compassionate and experienced and it seems to me therefore that any mitigation should be aimed where it is needed most—and it is needed most by the children who are the product of the families, and by those children who have no families.

I would have thought that this meshes very closely with a launch that took place two days ago under the chairmanship of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester on the effects of taxation on the family. What that revealed—incontrovertibly, in my view—is that there is a taxation bias. It is not deliberate, and the calculations are immensely intricate. The interaction of various factors means that families are worse off than they would be if they were not families and that, in particular, in-work parents under taxation are treated less favourably than those out of work. Therefore, my simple, not eloquent and not very clever suggestion is that if it is too expensive to mitigate across the board—which I assume it is—it would be sensible and compassionate to make the mitigation relate to the children in the spectrum, and in particular to children in families.