Universal Credit Regulations 2013

Lord German Excerpts

Wednesday 13th February 2013 Lords Chamber

There is so much more that I want to ask, but I know that other noble Lords want to speak and we have much to get through. There are some major questions to be answered about the way that the regulations operationalise universal credit. Is the IT up and running? Will work pay for all? Will doing more hours always pay? Will claimants be sanctioned for not being able to find decent childcare? Can disabled people afford to work? There is so much more. I very much look forward to questions from other noble Lords and to the Minister’s answers. I beg to move.

[Lord German]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, on asking a broad range of questions. I was going to ask some of them myself and so I will not repeat them. A lot of other questions need to be raised. I am grateful also to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which advised us:

“We … hope that DWP will ensure that sufficient time is allowed for members to absorb fully the content”,

of the regulations,

“prior to the debate”.

My absorption rate may be generally high, but having received about an hour ago a further five and a half pages of information, I am doing my very best. We have had so much material to look at and so it is very important that we discover very swiftly the intentions of the regulations.

The support that we as Liberal Democrats give to the introduction of universal credit is constant, but the architecture now being put in place raises a large number of questions about much of the detail. I appreciate that much of it has been in guidance rather than in the regulations themselves. We do not have all the guidance at present and some of it is stamped “Not official” but is guidance for guidance that may well become official in days to come.

I start with the back end of the regulations, which is monitoring and evaluation. Noble Lords who sat through the process of the Welfare Reform Bill becoming an Act will know that that is an issue with which we vexed ourselves greatly at the time. I am pleased to have received the programme produced by the Government, which tells us that we will be engaged in what is called the theory of change model. How far does that proposal vary from the traditional route for evaluation methodologies used by the Department for Work and Pensions—in fact, used by the Government as a whole—particularly in respect of behavioural change? If there is one thing that we must learn from the regulations, it is that they need to be continually reviewed and changed. I am pleased that the guidance on some of the sets of regulations that we are debating today says that they will be continually updated. However, we need to know what the process is for that and particularly to have some sense of a timeline and of how Parliament can be engaged with the outcomes, and not just in the set-piece debates and milestones that have been the fairly traditional route for this Parliament to deal with these matters.