Lord Freud
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, for the amendment which gives an opportunity to debate again a most important issue which is close to her heart and with which I am sympathetic. Over the years we have had quite a few discussions on how the issue is best addressed.
Single-tier reforms strengthen the contributory principle and reduce disparities in outcomes between individuals. They are designed to fit with the working lives of today’s young people, who should find it much easier to plan for the future, counting on a full single-tier pension. At first glance, it may appear that the national insurance treatment of those in low-paying mini-jobs is at odds with these principles. However, I would like to explain why we think mini-jobs are not the problem they might seem to be and why, looking at how to adjust the national insurance system to combat this perceived problem, we may end up with solutions which create more problems and knock-on impacts than they solve.
The noble Baroness has been as assiduous as always in exploring all the sources to illustrate her case for change. Her central estimate was that 250,000 people would be affected. I continue to be confident in the department’s estimate of the number who—if we were to aggregate their earnings in the way proposed—would gain that extra qualifying year. That number is some 50,000 at any one time, which is fewer than one in 500 workers. This number makes perfect sense when you look at the opportunities the national insurance system provides for gaining state pension qualifying years. The entry point for workers is through the lower earnings limit, which is set at £109 a week. This is £40 below the primary threshold which is when national insurance starts to be paid. At the national minimum wage, this is just 18 hours a week for a year or six months of full-time work. There is also a comprehensive crediting system that recognises caring responsibilities and those unable to work.
The 50,000 figure is a snapshot from 2012-13 and individuals may gain a qualifying year in other years. In the single-tier system, full pension entitlement is achieved after someone has built up 35 qualifying years. People can therefore spend a third of their working lives outside the national insurance system and still gain the full single-tier amount. This was a deliberate part of our design, to recognise that people have increasingly varied careers and working lives, and yet can still reasonably count on a full single-tier pension in their retirement planning.
My noble friend Lord German inquired about the timetable for the introduction of universal credit. We are planning to pull that in for the bulk of people, virtually everyone, in 2016 and 2017. That would certainly include everyone in the workforce. The numbers beyond that are some of the people who are currently on ESA on a long-term basis in the support section.
If we were to take a similar snapshot to that of the 50,000 in 2012-13 but in 2017, we would find that individuals with the same characteristics may well be getting a credit through universal credit. This will bring at least a further 800,000 people into national insurance credits. For instance, the partner of the claimant or those on very low earnings—below the lower earnings limit—will be brought into universal credit because the Government believe that it should pay to work.
We have had a parallel discussion on zero hours, which has clearly been a source of concern around the Chamber today. There is concern at one level from the employment practices perspective. As noble Lords are fully aware, BIS is consulting on this issue. There is also a degree of uncertainty around the prevalence of this practice and whether it is increasing; as noble Lords have pointed out, the ONS is looking closely at evidence for this. However, we know that the proportion of women with two or more jobs is similar to the proportion of 10 years ago; in other words, around 5% of all workers. We are not talking about using the word “exponential”, which I have heard around the Chamber once or twice this afternoon. The number of women in full-time work rose in the past year by more than 270,000, and the number of women in two jobs actually decreased in that year by 25,000.
Clearly, when we look at zero-hours contracts, I need to make the point to the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, that I did not indicate in Committee, nor have I indicated, that the number of individuals on those contracts was small or in some way insignificant. However, the question at hand here is about access to the national insurance system and there is no evidence to suggest that being on this type of contract presents barriers to entering the national insurance system because of low pay.
Figures from the Labour Force Survey and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development—the CIPD—both show that those on zero-hour contracts work an average of around 20 hours a week, as my noble friend Lord German pointed out. This is enough to exceed the lower earnings limit even on the national minimum wage of £6.31 an hour. Data from the ONS suggest that the average wage for those on a zero-hours contract is nearer £200 a week. In response to the point of the noble Lord, Lord Morris, the Labour Market Statistics show that full-time employment in the year is up 408,000, and part-time employment has gone down by 12,000.
I understand that the amendment is permissive, and even without any evidence of a significant problem one might think it would be helpful to increase the Government’s options in this respect. However, it is simply not necessary, given the extensive regulation-making powers already available, to modify the crediting system. In response to my noble friend Lord Forsyth, it is hardly useful to have redundant legislation on the books.
This amendment would allow people to opt in to have their earnings aggregated. It is not clear that this can be achieved without requiring a very high evidence base. For instance, if we introduced a system where people could effectively send in the employee’s rate of national insurance, we introduce incentives for employers to play the system. Some will contrive to avoid employers’ national insurance but without disturbing their employees’ national insurance position. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, suggested that the employer need not pay national insurance. However, even if that were the case there is still a significant burden on the employer. We also could not verify the wages without disproportionate cost. This would incentivise people to underreport earnings to get into the system on the cheap.
Aggregating earnings would have significant consequences for employers, including those people who would not now consider themselves to be employers. Take, for instance, the position of a woman whose job it is to clean private houses for a few hours each day of the week. The nature of the work would mean that she is likely to be employed and could have a number of jobs with different households. Under aggregation, each of those households would need to operate a Pay As You Earn scheme. They would need to contact HMRC to open such a scheme. They would then need to obtain and familiarise themselves with payroll software and use it to report earnings under real-time information to HMRC every time they pay their cleaner.
In response to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Morris, on joined-up thinking between the DWP and HMRC, I am pleased to say that we are actually working—I suspect for the first time—in a very joined-up way to get the RTI system to work. However, we do not want to require employers who would otherwise not have to have a PAYE scheme to open one up on an ad hoc basis. The point discussed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, which would allow people to class themselves as self-employed, seems slightly odd given the concern about job security that motivates the debate we have just had over zero-hours contracts. Blurring the line between employment and self-employment is a minefield from a tax policy perspective. It introduces incentives to create more mini-jobs and to play the system.
The processes required to capture and collate earnings from people in mini-jobs cannot be achieved by simply tweaking the system. Moving to the aggregation of earnings from mini-jobs can only sensibly be considered under the work on the operational integration of income tax and national insurance contributions announced at Budget 2011 by the Chancellor. As noble Lords will be aware, national insurance liability is calculated on a per job basis but income tax liability is aggregated across all sources of earnings so the issues are similar. The Government concluded that given the scale of the change that operational integration would entail and the amount of change that employers are already managing, including the introduction of real-time information, they would await further progress on these before moving forward on tax/national insurance integration.
In the short term, we are not complacent and are determined that people who do the right thing and work are treated fairly. Beyond a radical overhaul of state pensions in this part of the Bill, specifically to make it fit for today’s workers, I have described work that this Government have undertaken to expand crediting coverage for low earners through universal credit and improving monitoring of zero-hours contracts.
This amendment may be intended to place a marker to nudge the Government into taking action, but it comes without strong evidence of a problem and the type of action that it promotes is piecemeal tinkering, which could create perverse outcomes and new unfairnesses, especially in the tax and national insurance system. I hope that the noble Baroness will withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I should like first to say a word about procedure. I am glad to see the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, in her place; that is helpful. This is a paving amendment that the Public Bill Office assures me is appropriate. Amendment 21 in this group—and only Amendment 21—is consequential on Amendment 2. Therefore, any vote on the first amendment is, in the words of the Companion, also a vote on its directly consequential amendment—although it does not, of course, determine any other amendments in the group. If it were not directly consequential there would be no point in a paving amendment. As I have carefully taken the clerk’s advice on this, I hope that the Minister and the House will agree with my statements. If the Minister does not agree that Amendment 21 is consequential, perhaps he could indicate so now because I would not wish to waste the House’s time.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I am grateful to the noble Lord, as this allows us to have a substantive discussion on bereavement—which I know concerns many of your Lordships—in good time and not in the late hours this evening. I know that the Minister is sympathetic to the situation of distressed children and widowed parents. I hope that I can refer generally to widows, as there are three times as many women who are bereaved with children as men—and I know that the Minister means well by them. I hope that the House will agree that this is neither a party matter nor, as it is permissive, a cost matter, as the cost is almost too low to estimate.
This is a modest amendment that seeks to help widowed persons avoid additional pressure in the most stressful and distressing period of their lives. Three-fifths of bereaved parents are in work at the time of bereavement—virtually all fathers and around half or so of mothers. Most fathers with a terminally ill wife continue, or continued, to work. Most mothers, however, give up their jobs to care for their husband. Fathers would normally go back to work after a couple of weeks; indeed, they are often anxious to do so. Some mothers may feel able to do so as well, depending on the age of their children and the nature of their job. However, many widowed mothers were not in work, because they had younger children, or they had stopped working to become carers and—this is key—many mothers who were in work when their husband died drop out of work for some time while they support their children. If they return to work later, it may be to a different job, to one that is part-time or less demanding. Whereas work seems to be essential and continuous for fathers, it becomes secondary and broken for bereaved mothers.
The Government are reconstructing bereavement benefits, with more money paid as an up-front lump sum and less as a monthly payment—which, at £400 a month, will be paid only for 12 months and topped up by universal credit while the claimant is out of work. After 12 months, bereavement support payments stop and, if the parent does not return to work, she may draw her full income from UC. Being on UC normally entails work conditionality—entering or re-entering the labour market. The Minister has agreed—for which I am delighted—that for kinship carers, work conditionality associated with claiming UC should not apply for 12 months after they have taken on the care of children. But—and this is the point of my amendment—work conditionality for widowed parents, unlike for kinship carers, will kick in after six months, not 12 months, while they are still on bereavement benefit. That benefit runs for 12 months precisely because the Minister, in all decency—and I respect him for it—recognises that they need that support for 12 months. Surely work conditionality should be aligned with those 12 months.
The Minister said in Committee that he thought that six months’ relief from work conditionality while on bereavement allowance, if the claimant receives some UC top-up, was “generous”. I confess that that shocked me. It is generous only by comparison with the situation of someone who is not a bereaved spouse, and I think that that is not a proper comparison. If the mother has returned to work, or wants help to do so earlier than that—and some will—that is fine, but I do not think it right and decent to require her to attend work interviews and full work conditionality and job-hunting after six months, when she has grieving children who need her more than ever.
In Committee, the Minister justified this by saying that work conditionality after six months,
“is necessary to help them adjust and regain control of their lives”.—[Official Report, 15/1/14; col. GC 146.]
I was shocked by that as well. From my experience, the exact opposite is true. If work conditionality kicks in at six months while the woman is still on bereavement benefits and she is not ready for it, she loses what little control she has in handling her family life. Instead, that power is transferred to the DWP—perhaps to a 23 year-old young man in a local benefit office who, I expect, will be well intentioned until the pressure of targets bears down on him. He is probably a young man without children and without any experience of bereavement. It is assumed that he knows better than she does what is best for her and her children in their grief. I hope that he asks his own mother for advice, because he probably will not have a clue.
I do not think that that is acceptable. We are turning this young man at the age of 23 into her parent and treating her as the child, denying her, as a parent, the ability to look after her children in the way she believes is best. This is a sort of cruel-to-be-kind, tough-love philosophy towards a grieving widow and severely distressed children. Tough love is perhaps fine for youngsters who are on JSA and do not want to get up in the morning, but we are bullying into seeking work a widow with children who is still numb with grief and hugely distressed. We really cannot have that.
In this paving amendment and the consequential amendment attached to it I am not arguing that a widow’s benefit should be increased, although personally I would support that. The amendment is not about more money; it is about allowing widows to decide what is best for them and their family in the immediate aftermath of bereavement. For me, the immediate aftermath is the first year during which all the anniversaries occur—Christmas, his birthday and the anniversary of his death. I know, as do many of your Lordships, that that first year is the hardest.
I ask your Lordships to put themselves in the widow’s place. Her husband’s death may have been sudden, due to an accident at work or in the car, and she is still traumatised by the shock, or he may have died after an illness such as a stroke or cancer and she is exhausted through caring for him. She is wiped out and her mental and physical health is pretty fragile. It is just at this time when, although she is exhausted herself, her children are distraught and most need her. Children I know who have experienced the death of a parent have regressed into bed-wetting, nightmares, broken sleep and school phobia. They have lots of mysterious tummy aches and frequent headaches, and they display challenging and clearly needy behaviour. Irrationally, they suffer anguish that in some way they were responsible for their father’s death. They feel guilty that they had never told the lost parent how much they loved him and are fearful that they may lose their mother as well.
Older children worry about their mother’s safety if she is late back, or they fear they may lose their home. They are profoundly upset a second time over at their mother’s grief. Stoically they try not to weep, as that makes it harder for her to cope. “He is not here to hug me”, said one young girl. They dream of him and experience severe depression. Children need their surviving parent to be physically available for them. They need the trust that exists between a child and his mother to discuss their father’s death. Emotional availability follows from that. In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord German, quoted very movingly from research into the effect of bereavement on children’s later lives, from delinquency to poor mental health and suicide risk, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, mentioned cases of multiple deaths.
Every family is different, as is the work status of any bereaved parent, but this amendment, at no cost, permits the bereaved parent to decide what is appropriate for her and her family. We know that currently, bereaved parents do not take all the time off that they could from work. They do not exploit the system; they do not abuse it; they do not milk it. They want to work when they feel fit enough and their children are steady enough, but only they know that, not the DWP or the local benefit office. That is the point of having 12 months of bereavement payments. Insisting on work interviews and work conditionality at six months, or even leaving it to the discretion of 23 year-olds in local offices, adds stress to the suffering of the parent and distress to the pain of the child. We really should not do that.
The amendment would give widowed parents a breathing space from work conditionality alongside a bereavement payment while they rebuild their fractured lives. This House has always looked out for widows and children and I hope that it will do so again today. I beg to move.
Lord Freud
My Lords, the House may find it helpful to know that, although I do not agree that a change to conditionality in respect of only this specific group of amendments is appropriate, I am proposing to conduct a wider review into the circumstances where children could be in considerable distress and where it is clear that conditionality should not be applied. I am not attempting to curtail debate but it may be of advantage to the House to have that information in order that we may have a more informed debate on this group of amendments.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, I have Amendments 18, 19 and 20 in this group. I am grateful to the Minister for informing us of his proposal to hold a review of the level at which conditionality is set in relation to considerable distress in bereaved children. I appreciate his concern and the time that he has spent with me and others in looking at the problems of bereaved children.
However, I must point out that bereaved children express emotions differently from adults. Indeed, the most distressed children often appear almost blunted to the death of the parent and are simply quiet, withdrawn and can even appear disinterested. I hope that there will be no attempt to assess an individual child’s distress because I can foresee the problem of some families blaming that child for not caring enough, and therefore blaming that child for somehow not falling into a group that could have had more benefit. Sadly, transference occurs in bereavement and sometimes bereaved parents project their anger at the death on to the way in which the bereaved child is behaving and are on a very short fuse with the child, which compounds that child’s isolation. These are complex situations and there are serious long-term sequelae.
When a parent dies the support that the state offers must be easy to understand. It must support the widowed parent in providing support to their grieving children. Noble Lords are well aware that the death of a parent places enormous pressure on the rest of the family. The surviving parent has to both provide stability to children and adjust to life as the sole carer and earner while dealing with their own grief as well as that of their children. Quite often they have had no time to begin to adjust to impending widowhood—for example, in any sudden death, whether it is through a road accident, manslaughter, murder, suicide or whatever—and yet their children’s need for stability following the death of a parent makes it vital that the surviving parent is available to them, is present and is able to respond to their needs, which may change almost from minute to minute, hour to hour.
Stopping payments after only one year will have a significant impact on family finances but the major disruptions include the widowed parent often having to increase their working hours to replace lost income, thereby being less available to the children at the time when they are most in need of support. Amendment 18 seeks to increase the period of time that the bereavement support payment is payable to at least three years or until the youngest child has reached the age of seven, whichever is the longest period.
Can the Minister clarify the cost analysis that underpins the decision to end bereavement support payment after only one year, because one year is much too short to address a family’s needs? Removing the payment at the first anniversary of the death adds an additional pressure on the family at a time that is already very emotionally difficult when they often relive the acute episode surrounding the bereavement. Many families report that the second and subsequent years following bereavement are even harder than the first because support from friends and family tends to disappear and children can experience late effects of dealing with grief and bereavement.
The current allowance is paid until the youngest child leaves full-time education. The proposal to reduce this to a period of just one year is a dramatic change. Data provided by the Childhood Bereavement Network suggest that only one family in 28—that is, 4%—claims for less than one year. Most families would therefore receive payments under this Bill for a much, much shorter time than they would under current arrangements, especially if the children are younger. In Committee I described the shortening of this period of time as cruel. A year is a very short time in the life of those bereaved, whether adult or child.
The current benefit is paid until children leave full-time education in recognition partly of the complex emotional needs of young children. Removing the payment when the dependent children are very young is particularly worrying. Pre-school children become very clingy when they realise that one parent is no longer around. They require stability and security. The grief of losing a parent is challenging enough without compounding the disruption caused by the stress of worsened financial hardship for the surviving parent with the premature ending of a bereavement support payment.
Amendment 19 seeks to clarify that the bereavement support payment will be payable to a widow who is pregnant at the time of her spouse’s death. Can the Minister confirm that when the spouse of a pregnant woman dies the allowance would be payable to her? Amendment 20 seeks to clarify what support would be offered in the tragic event of both parents dying. Can the Minister confirm that in the event that both parents die, the guardian of the surviving children under the age of 18 will be eligible for any bereavement support payment which would have been paid to a surviving parent had that parent not died, and that the guardian has six months in which to lodge the claim? Can the Minister also confirm that the changes to the bereavement support payment do not affect the guardian’s allowance? Finally, can the Minister confirm that changes to the bereavement support payment do not affect child benefit?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I am not surprised, having sat through Committee, that this has been such a powerful debate. We have had some very important, moving and well informed speeches at all stages of the Bill touching on these subjects. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and to the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for sharing their expertise in these areas, as well as to the noble Lord, Lord Rix, for being willing to share with us the experience of bereavement and its ongoing impact on one’s life at any age.
My noble friend Lady Hollis laid out the case very strongly at the outset. I am delighted that the Minister is interested in reviewing the impact on families with a distressed child and how that relates to conditionality in the future. It is an excellent commitment and I look forward to seeing the results of it. It is up to my noble friend Lady Hollis to make a judgment on this but I do not think that that in any way precludes the need for this amendment, which is about a very specific category of person—people who are bereaved and who may find themselves going on to claim universal credit but who would normally be expected to go out to work because they had children of school age. Both of those things are important.
I still have with me the very powerful speech made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby at Second Reading, in which he laid out his experience of pastoral care for the bereaved, something reprised very effectively today by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Wakefield. I do not need to say very much more about why this matters. Many Members of this House have had experience of bereavement in one way or another and there can be few more important issues than how a country supports its citizens when the worst of all possible things happens to them.
The Government’s case throughout this debate has been that these bereavement reforms are not really about money. From 2016 to 2020, they estimate the changes will cost an extra £110 million, because they will protect payments under the current system, but that thereafter, in total, there will be small savings. The argument is that these are reforms not cuts. The Government have said throughout that they want to simplify the system and put resources where, in their view, they are most needed: as a short-term intervention to allow a bereaved spouse or civil partner to deal with the immediate costs of the death of a partner. If support is needed in the longer term, that is what universal credit is for.
Amendments 18 to 20, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, address the question of how long bereavement support should be paid for. In Committee, the noble Baroness laid out some very moving circumstances in which families could find themselves, clearly drawing on her own clinical experience. I know that the Minister expressed sympathy with what she said, and it may be that his review of distress will address that. I would be interested to see what he has to say when he comes to speak.
Amendments 2 and 21, in the name of my noble friend Lady Hollis, quite specifically seek to relax the work conditionality requirement for those in receipt of bereavement support payment. This is particularly important for widowed parents. There is a difference between those who do not want to work and those who would like to work, or go back to work, but who have been forced to recognise that the reality of the state that their children are in is such that they have to choose—of course they will choose their children and not work, unless they have literally no choice. Some parents will need a longer period, both to adjust to their own grief and shock and to deal with the grief and shock faced by their children.
It has already been pointed out that the regulations for universal credit mean that kinship carers are exempt from work conditionality for a year from the time that they assume the care of the child. This was agreed by the Minister—under the persuasive pressure of my noble friend Lady Drake and others—in recognition of the fact that adults need time to adjust to being, effectively, a single parent. Why should the same principle not apply to bereavement? I would be very interested if the Minister could answer one question about his review: does he intend to change the regulations to allow bereaved parents specifically to be exempt from conditionality? In Committee, he said that he was reviewing this and that he wanted to change the guidance given to decision-makers in jobcentres. But that is a very different question altogether. I can see why that might be the way forward for distress in general—after all, distress comes in very different forms and some judgment would have to be made about when the family was distressed. The awful thing about bereavement is that it is horribly clear: one is either bereaved or one is not, and I therefore do not think there is a need for the kind of flexibility that might be needed in other circumstances.
I also worry because I have heard many cases, as I am sure other noble Lords have, where young jobcentre officials, with the best of intentions, ended up making bad decisions because they did not properly understand what it was like to be a single parent trying to juggle more than one child and a part-time job. That person could of course simply say, “I am sorry but despite whatever you say, I am not going back to work because I have to prioritise my children”. If that happens, their benefits get sanctioned. They can appeal, but do we really want them to have to go through that six months after losing their husband, wife or civil partner? When 58% of appeals against sanctions on jobseeker’s allowance are successful, how much are we willing to bet the farm on the effectiveness of decisions by individuals in jobcentres? In my case, it would be not very much.
At Second Reading the noble Lord, Lord German, used words such as “harsh” and “cruel” to describe the decision to force widowed parents back to work after six months. I believe that he was right. He cited the research, which he touched on again today, showing that outcomes for children very much depend on the effectiveness of the remaining parent in coping. That is partly about their availability to children. All that this amendment from my noble friend Lady Hollis does is to ask that those widowed parents who need to claim universal credit alongside bereavement support payment to make ends meet should not be required to go back to work for 12 months. After all, the Government have decided to focus their support on that first 12 months, so surely they should be willing simply to stretch this for the same period.
I have heard it said that a year is too long: since employers do not offer bereavement leave for a year, why should the state? It is because employers cannot do that that so many parents end up giving up their jobs when they lose their spouse or civil partner. The combination of burdens is simply too much to cope with. Universal credit is meant to be the safety net for those very parents, and it must be here. This amendment specifically recognises that the Government are planning to recycle all the resources spent on bereavement to be able to create this new system. All it does is to give them the power to recycle that money in whatever way they want, such that that reform should include this small change—that for 12 months after losing one’s husband, wife or civil partner a parent should not be forced back to work.
We should be clear that a decent society will not put bereaved children in the position of having lost one parent only to find that the other is not able to give them the level of care that they need at this crucial time. Many people in this House will know that losing a parent in childhood is a life-changing event: one never gets over it. We cannot protect children from that horror but when it happens, please let us at least say that we will support the remaining parent as best we can. It is clear that this House does not think that the Government have got this part of the Bill right. Amendments 2 and 19 give them the means and the incentive to go away and get this right. I urge the Minister to accept them.
Lord Freud
My Lords, losing a spouse is one of the most tragic circumstances that a person will have to endure and, as such, it has been recognised since the outset of the welfare system that the bereaved need some financial assistance. Bereavement benefits form a crucial part of state support but limited reforms over the years have led to a complex system, which has not kept pace with changes in the benefit system or wider changes in society. This legislation will address this. With a simple payment structure focusing support on the period immediately after the bereavement and a single contribution condition, the new bereavement support payment will be far more easily understood and claimed. It will mean that more people will benefit, particularly younger widows.
A claim to the new bereavement support payment is made by the surviving spouse or civil partner. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, raised those extremely tragic cases where not only is there one bereavement but the surviving spouse dies shortly afterwards. She is of course right that there can be no expectation that a claim is made by the surviving spouse in such circumstances. I take this opportunity to make it absolutely clear that, as with the current benefits, there will be arrangements in place for claims to be made posthumously. Every year, the Department for Work and Pensions receives around 10 posthumous claims to bereavement benefits made on behalf of a bereaved spouse who has subsequently died. There are regulations to ensure that appropriate payment can be made in respect of these claims.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, the noble Lord has misrepresented both my amendment and my speech. I said that many parents would welcome it, but that the decision on at which point within that 12 months they returned to the labour market lay with them, not with the local benefit office.
Lord Freud
The point I am trying to make is that it is far better to recognise that individual responses to grief vary. As a number of noble Lords have said, grief often does not manifest in behavioural and emotional challenges until months or even years down the line, as a child matures. That is why, under universal credit, advisers have the flexibility to personalise requirements at any point, responding as circumstances arise. Where parents are facing difficulties with school, childcare arrangements or other extenuating circumstances, advisers can limit or even lift requirements.
I recognise that the application of that flexibility depends on the ability of those advisers. While I feel that our advisers are able, it is important to ensure that they have the best guidance and training to deal with such difficult cases. That is why we are currently working with experts in the field including the Childhood Bereavement Network, the Children’s Society, Cruse Bereavement Care, WAY and Gingerbread, to ensure that guidance and learning clearly articulate how advisers can identify and support parents in these circumstances, including the particular circumstances in which it would be inappropriate to apply conditionality. Our advisory services are also being repositioned as a profession with a clear career path, accredited learning and ongoing professional development. The learning programme will ensure that advisers have up-to-date skills to deal with any claimant interaction and support them in making relevant and appropriate decisions on an individual basis.
That is the standing position. I now move to the more specific response that I wish to make following our discussions in Grand Committee, particularly in answer to the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. I recognise that there are circumstances in which children could be in considerable distress and in which it is clear that conditionality should not be applied and flexibility is essential. I do not, however, see such cases as being limited to bereavement. There may be other circumstances in which children need additional care—for instance, where a family is fleeing domestic violence.
I assure the noble Baroness that we are not looking for a measure to define “distress”. Indeed, we need to establish exactly what the expression means; we are using it as a shorthand and there may be a much better way of capturing the concept, which is one of the things that a review should do. We are looking to identify specific circumstances in which we could expect a child to be distressed, and in which they will therefore have additional needs that need to be recognised. Claimants would need to demonstrate only the circumstances they are in, not the fact of distress, which is, as the noble Baroness has pointed out, extraordinarily difficult to establish.
I therefore want to conduct a review as quickly possible, in order to embed any new rules in the regime before we take new claims to universal credit from families. That is why I propose to undertake the review myself. I would like, in practice, to conclude that review by June or so. I will report back to the House following that. I am not quite sure of what form that will take but we will find the right form nearer the time.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I am sorry, but why? The noble Lord has already made the judgment on kinship parents. This is a permissive amendment, which he can draw on if needed. If he does not need it because of his review he does not need to deploy it. It is there as a safety net, so why is he asking the House to make it an either/or judgment?
Lord Freud
My Lords, this is not a permissive amendment. It makes a change to the conditionality regime for one element. If I need to look at how I do a review, I would have to look again at the specific context of doing this review.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I am sorry; I crave the indulgence of the House. Let me read the substance of Amendment 21:
“The Secretary of State may by regulation and within the overall budget for bereavement support payment exempt any widowed parent from work conditionality while in receipt of said payment”.
The Secretary of State “may” do that by regulation. As I said, the amendment is permissive. I am sorry that the noble Lord did not, perhaps, fully appreciate that.
Lord Freud
My Lords, let me make my point here. I will have to look again. As noble Lords know, a “may” in this context is a very substantial “may”. I will have to look again at the context in which I would want to do something such as this. I may very well want to do it, but I cannot make a commitment to have both at this stage. On that basis, I urge the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I am still slightly baffled by the less than satisfactory response of the Minister. Let me first thank the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, the noble Lord, Lord Rix, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Wakefield and my noble friend Lady Sherlock for their very powerful and moving speeches on something that really matters: trying to protect and support widowed parents for the first 12 months of their bereavement. I welcome the Minister’s offer of a review on distress. However, what he has suggested is so wide that I rather doubt—although I would be pleased to be proven wrong—that he will be able to turn this into effective policy.
I give one tiny example, which I was thinking of as the Minister spoke. He was going to extend this to the distress of cohabiting parents when one of them dies. It is not too far fetched to suggest to the House a situation where a woman was with the father of her child or children in a cohabiting relationship but they then separated. She then had a period of perhaps five or seven years with someone else, to whom the children really connected and related. Then she moved on to a new boyfriend—a new stepfather—for perhaps the past year. Could the Minister tell me which of those three would have to die—forgive the language—for her to be entitled to bereavement benefit under the proposal of distress? Is it the recent stepfather, over whom the children are not especially distressed but the mother is highly distressed; the long-term stepfather, who has helped to bring them up, to whom the children were committed and over whom they are distressed while she is less so; or their natural father, who is giving them financial support and they see regularly? Which is it? I suspect one cannot do what the Minister seeks to do.
Lord Freud
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for making the point for me. If we do these things piecemeal, we will not get the right answer. That is why my response to what the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said to me in Grand Committee was to think that we need to look at this comprehensively. We need to get this issue right across the piece and understand how to incorporate it as a whole into our conditionality regime. That is the response that I am looking to do, not to sort it out on the Floor of the House where we simply do not have enough information to do it properly at this stage.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I make two points. First, we are not seeking to sort it out on the Floor of the House. I am seeking the consent of the House, if it is so minded to give it, to a permissive amendment, which does not commit the Government to anything they subsequently decide is inappropriate in the light of further research. The second point is that the Minister’s definition of distress is so wide that I genuinely believe, from my limited experience in Parliament, that he will find it very difficult indeed to turn it into deliverable policy. I am sure he is as aware as I am that it will end up depending on the discretion—he made this point himself—of local people in local benefits offices, such as the 23 year-old who will be interviewing the widowed parent. Is she numb? If so, does that mean she is coping or not caring sufficiently? Alternatively, is she voluble? Does that mean she is coping or not caring? He will have to peer into her soul and we should not go there.
The Minister says that he wants to help widowed parents to adjust, to,
“regain control of their lives”,
with tailored solutions. He is saying that the local benefits office, the 23 year-old, will decide. The 23-year old will turn her into his dependant, reliant on his judgment as to what she should do and what is best for her family. That is inappropriate and improper. You are making the adult back into a child and adding to her stress and distress. The Minister should not be going down that path. He will not be able to do it by clear policy; he will depend on discretion. Neither of those routes is satisfactory for a small and coherent group that we can easily define—that is, widowed parents with children following a bereavement.
The Minister is opposing a permissive amendment dealing with a small, specific group, which he can respond to exactly as he has already helped—and I am glad of it—kinship carers. He has allowed kinship carers 12 months off on work conditionality; he can do the same thing for this very specific group and make their work conditionality freedom align with the 12 months in which they are receiving bereavement benefit. After all, that is precisely why they have bereavement benefit in the first place. If they have it because they need support following their bereavement, at the same time they need the freedom from the additional pressure that the Minister’s work conditionality will ensure.
The Minister said that it was not quite either/or, but suggested that—
Lord Freud
My Lords, I just want to make the point that if you pick out particular groups and have legislation just for them, you end up with the kind of carbuncled benefit system that we are trying to escape from. I am determined to try to build a system that is coherent across the piece, and I want to look at all the situations to make sure that they are consistent.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I understand the Minister’s support for grand schemes. We will see whether the grand scheme of universal credit, which I support, will deliver what he hopes that it does—and I hope it does. But here we are dealing with a situation in which we have kinship carers and widowed parents, and we may be talking subsequently about women experiencing distress in domestic abuse situations, and the Minister is trying to make something coherent. He is trying to fit them into one common mould, but he does not have to. He may come up with appropriate and different solutions for different groups because, as he himself said in his reply, every family is different and may need different help. This amendment would allow him to do precisely that.
The amendment does not cut across any review in any way, any more than his 12-month provision for kinship carers does. It seeks only to protect a small, identifiable and precise group from additional pressures of work conditionality at no cost at all and at a time when they and their children are most deeply distressed. I do not think that they should be put on the back burner for a review that may or may not deliver what I hope the House will think is the right path to take. If the review goes ahead and the Minister does not need the amendment, as it is permissive, he does not need to draw on it. If his review falters, which I think it will because he is asking too much of it, the amendment would give protection to some of the most vulnerable people in our country at the time of their deepest grief.
It is very simple. The amendment is permissive but says that we recognise the situation of widows and widowed parents and will give them, under the new system, one year of bereavement benefits and payments. This amendment asks for that one year, which we recognise is the period of most grief and distress, and that we should also not apply the pressure of work conditionality. This House has always looked out for widows and children, and I am asking the House to do it again today. The amendment is permissive and cost-free, and the Minister can build on it if he wishes to do the review. It is just a small safety net of help for grieving children and their grieving parent. I beg your Lordships to protect them tonight. I wish to test the opinion of the House.