Welfare Reform Bill

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Thursday 10th November 2011 Grand Committee

My preference would be that Clause 69 does not stand part of the Bill. So long as it does, I believe that amendments such as these and the amendment in the name of my noble friends are vital to ensure that the needs of some of the most vulnerable members of our society continue to be met. I beg to move.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my colleague, who, like me, at the time, was fulminating against the introduction of the Social Fund as a wicked Tory trick. I remember the debates very well. I was standing shoulder to shoulder with her at the time. In view of the experience since 1986, the Social Fund migrated into a place that met the need much better than I expected. There is a little vignette here which I hope I can convince the Minister to go away and think a little more about because the Social Fund replaced single payments. Single payments were a rock-solid, embedded system in the social security system and it was fully appealable, all the way through to the Social Security Appeal Tribunal and, indeed, to commissioners in 1986. One of the reasons why the noble Baroness and I were so aghast at the proposal was that the initial 1986 White Paper suggested that there should be no appeal of any kind on the grounds that these were discretionary payments, so how could you have rules for them?

That was all fine until the Council of Tribunals—these are big legal cheeses—produced a report and, for the purposes of the further elucidation of the Committee, I have obtained a copy of it. It is a special report of the Council of Tribunals when, in 1986, it waded into the argument. I shall quote two sentences about the importance of independent review of any social security decisions. The council was responding to the White Paper and said that,

“the people most affected by this proposal are among the most vulnerable in society. Very good reasons are needed before abolition of the right to an independent appeal in such circumstances, an appeal which has existed for over 50 years”—

in 1986. It continued:

“It would probably be the most substantial abolition of a right to appeal to an independent tribunal since the Council of Tribunals was set up by Parliament in 1958, following the Franks report. It is for these reasons that we are so critical of the proposal. In our last Annual Report we described it as highly retrograde”.

That was an interesting intervention at the time. What did the Government of the day do? They took it back and thought about it carefully and a man called Mr Tony Newton, who was the Minister of State, had second thoughts and went away and produced amendments, which the Commons accepted. They were then sent back to the Lords and the Lords capped the sensible amendments that had been introduced by the then Mr Tony Newton by introducing the Social Fund Commissioner. The Office of the Social Fund Commissioner was set up at that stage and has been extremely successful, much more successful than some of us thought at the time. It filled a need, and that need is greater now than it was then. My point about the vignette is that it is possible for Ministers of State to listen to what has been said to them about the need for independent scrutiny and review, to go away and reflect and to come back with some better ideas.

I cannot resist this Tony Newton quote. After a good deal of prodding in the ribs by many of us, he said that there should be,

“some clearly established machinery that was separate from and outside the normal management chain of . . . the social security system . . . to provide the kind of confidence that hon. Members”—

he was in the Commons at the time—

“felt was necessary to show that an element of independence was being applied”—[Official Report, Commons, 19/5/86; col. 43.]

He did the business and it was sorted. It was the House of Lords that put the final touches to it in a way that made the system work. That is a lesson that we should bear in mind this afternoon. The noble Baroness has set the scene very well, and I concur with everything she said, which is why I have put my name to these amendments.