Welfare Reform Bill

Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts

Tuesday 21st February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Percy]

We need to address the failure to provide adequate housing stock in this country. However, I say to my hon. Friend and near neighbour that the Government’s proposal is not a way to do so. It is not a simple problem to solve.

The crux of the amendment is that if there is suitable accommodation to go into, people should go into it, but just as there is an insufficient number of bigger homes for families, there is an insufficient number of smaller, one-bedroom properties for those groups of people to go into. If we apply the argument that there is no suitable housing for one group of people and we must therefore do something about them, we should also argue that we should not penalise people who are under-occupying if there is no suitable accommodation for them.

The sensible element of the Lords amendment is that the penalty kicks in only if people refuse a suitable property. That is eminently fair. Hon. Members must come to their own conclusions, but I will vote accordingly. I look forward to hearing other contributions to the debate.

[Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

As the House may know, I agree with the Government on many aspects of the Bill and I have not always shared the sentiments of Opposition Front Benchers. I regret that, but I have made my position clear. However, I today wish to speak against the Government on their stance and to support my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms).

I do so because the change that the Government are making is shameful. Anyone who has sat through debates on the Bill will know that the Government’s body language is totally different to that in respect of other measures. They have been forced to take this measure by the Treasury. It goes against all that the Bill tries to achieve, which is to work with the grain of human nature. This proposal, which has been forced on the Department for Work and Pensions, works against that grain.

There are four reasons why Government Members should today save their favourite Front Benchers from the course that the Treasury is making them go down. First, let us imagine that places are available—that we could wave them into existence with a magic wand—and that all the people whom the Government condemn as under-occupying could move. That is the last thing the Government want, because to satisfy the Treasury requirements, the Department has had to enter into the accounts that it will make a substantial saving. If it were possible for people to move—all hon. Members know that it is not—the measure would fail, because it is being introduced not to even out housing, but to deliver a major saving in public expenditure to the Treasury by singling out the group who under-occupy. Therefore, the first reason why I hope Government supporters reject the measure is that it makes no sense.

Secondly, as we have heard, even if people move into the private sector, the total bill to taxpayers will be greater than if they stayed in social housing and were not penalised. The Government risk making the achieving of cuts in public expenditure that much more difficult than it is.

Thirdly, the Government’s proposal strikes against other major Government objectives with which I agree. The Government say that the reform is aimed at strengthening families and building stronger communities, but this move sticks a dagger into both those objectives. It will affect parents in families that have broken up and wish children to come and stay, and people who have carers rather than entering permanent care. Furthermore, as the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) said in his fine speech, people might snore. How many marriages have been saved because one partner who snored could move into another bedroom? These details do not appear in public accounts details but they appear in real life. If this measure passes, far from strengthening families and enabling them to relate to and visit one another more easily, it will make it more difficult, and it might well drive out of the community upstanding citizens who play a much wider role, in the most difficult circumstances, in trying to beat the yob culture that engulfs them.

There is a fourth reason I speak and wish Members, particularly on the Government Benches, to vote against the Government and save their own Front Benchers. The Government know that I do not accept all their poverty data, but they do not have the courage to come out, as I want them to do, and declare on that—perhaps one day they will find that courage. I do not think that the poverty data properly measure whether people are benefiting from the general rise in living standards that has occurred for generation upon generation in this country. Harold Macmillan said that the poor should benefit from rising living standards. One way of ensuring that they do so is to give them the freedoms that I and other hon. Members have—those small differences in life that so improve its quality. Having a spare bedroom with which to offer hospitality to family and friends can make such a difference to the quality of one’s life.

The Government know that they are going against a valuable tradition dating back to the Macmillan era. This is not a welfare reform measure. It will be a recruiting sergeant for the money lenders and will be looked on as an eviction measure. Given that the DWP cannot save itself from this terrible measure, forced on it by the Treasury, I hope that Government Members will save the Department from pushing through this nasty, mean little measure. I hope that the House will send a clear message to the House of Lords that, even if we do not win tonight, they should keep up the fight and send it back until there are enough Government Back Benchers to save the Department from this shabby little folly.

[Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD)]

It is a privilege to follow the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) on this issue and the issue of welfare reform generally. I have read what he has written for many years. I have some sympathy with what he and other colleagues have said, and with the amendment, and I have some specific concerns that I would like to put to the Government and on which I look forward to receiving clarification from the Minister.

First, however, I want to welcome the fact that the coalition Government have already put aside funds in the comprehensive spending review for severely disabled people who need carers either for 24 hours or overnight. I am glad of that. It was in the Lib Dem manifesto, and I am glad that it is being delivered by the coalition Government.

I have four concerns about the amendment, however, on which I seek reassurance from the Minister. The first is straightforward and concerns foster carers and social housing, about which one of my colleagues talked earlier. I would like the Minister to clarify exactly how the Government will manage the periods during which foster carers have one spare bedroom. Clearly the children of foster carers sometimes move on and there will be a gap before the next child arrives. I would therefore welcome some clarification from the Government of how that will be managed.

Secondly, a number of my disabled constituents, such as wheelchair users, have had extensive adaptations in their homes—I am thinking of one particular individual, in Langney—which have made a considerable difference to their lives. It took probably two or three years to get the work done in that case, and it would frankly be daft to move that individual out of her home because of the one-bedroom rule; the local authority has already spent £10,000 on those adaptations.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Grayling]

I will probably not be able to cover all the questions that have been raised, but I shall pick out some of the key points.

The right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) made a passionate defence of the spare room, referring back to the days of Macmillan and to the principles of the welfare state. I know that he is often a champion of welfare reform, and I listen carefully to what he says, but I find it difficult to justify maintaining 1 million spare rooms in the social rented sector when large numbers of families are living in temporary accommodation and in accommodation that is too small for them. I do not believe that the spare room is a luxury that the social rented sector can afford at the expense of children living in temporary rented accommodation. Fundamentally, that is what this change is about.

[Mr Field]

But it is not about that, is it? If the Government are going to deliver to the Treasury the moneys that they say they are going to save, that will depend on people not being able to react in the way that the Minister is describing.

[Chris Grayling]

As I keep saying, that is not the case. At the moment, local authorities up and down the country are paying out large amounts of money; the right hon. Gentleman should talk to his own local authority about the challenges and costs of providing temporary accommodation. We depend so heavily on temporary accommodation partly because of the failings of the previous Government, going back 10 or 15 years, in the construction of social rented housing. I remember looking at the figures in the early part of the last decade. Had the Blair Government continued to build social housing at the same rate as the Major Government, we would have seen something like 300,000 more families in social rented accommodation. The fact is, however, that they did not. This was not a priority for them when they took office in 1997, and they cut back on construction. Today, we are living in extraordinarily difficult times, financially, and we are dealing with the consequences of the decisions that were made 15 years ago.

[Mr Field]

We are not interested in the Blair Government or the Brown Government; the electorate decided that they should come to an end. We are interested in what this Government are doing. Does the Minister not accept that if people followed his advice and moved into the private sector, far from saving the amount spent on housing benefit, such a move would actually increase it?

[Chris Grayling]

I simply do not accept that. The right hon. Gentleman is making assumptions about people’s behaviour and about the cost of temporary accommodation. We as a nation are housing in extremely expensive temporary accommodation large numbers of people who can and should be housed properly. At the same time, we are supporting 1 million empty bedrooms in the social rented sector. My colleagues and I believe that we simply cannot afford to do that at this moment in time. This is not the world of 15 years ago. We have come into government with empty coffers, as the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) always reminds us. We are having to take tough decisions, some of which we might wish that we did not have to take, and we are trying to take them in as fair a way as possible.

My hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) asked about foster carers. The foster carers of this nation are to be enormously admired for the work that they do, and I appreciate that this is a sensitive issue. In putting in place discretionary funding, we have focused specifically on those people. On the status of a foster child, the approach that we are taking is not to treat foster children as members of the foster carer’s household in the calculation of the appropriate amount of housing benefit. That is because we are treating them in a different way. It is consistent with the current treatment of foster children in housing benefit assessments for those living in the private rented sector, but we disregard the whole of the foster carer allowance that is given to the foster parents when assessing eligibility for all income-related benefits. That leaves the majority of households who foster substantially better off, so the payment is made through the foster care support system in order to ensure that the family has sufficient resource to make money available for support to cover the costs of those children.

The whole point of making discretionary money available is, as my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson) said, that there are of course situations where there is a gap in a foster child’s presence in a household. When the money is not coming in, we need to use discretionary funding to ensure that the family is appropriately and properly supported. We do not want to see foster carers forced out for the very good work they do; it is really important that we provide them with support.

In the last few seconds available to me, let me say again that a spare bedroom is a valuable asset. Taxpayers’ money is already being used to provide accommodation at social sector rents, averaging £79 a week in England compared with £160 in the private rented sector. Asking the taxpayer to find a further half a billion pounds to enable—