Welfare Reform Bill

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

My Lords, I, too, was a Member of the Grand Committee considering this issue, and I apologise to the noble Baroness for being late for her opening remarks, whichever amendment she moved.

I shall pick up a point, if I may, made by my noble friend Lord Hamilton. The Government said that it was not a cost issue; there is no doubt about that. Indeed, the Minister was good enough to confess that. I have been thinking about this since we had our full discussion upstairs and I remain totally unconvinced that it is necessary to effect such a culture change. The notion that the kind of people we are seeking to serve with universal credit will fall into executive jobs that will pay them monthly into bank accounts is so remote from reality as to be unhelpful, but I put that to one side.

I say honestly to anybody who is listening that this is not a trivial matter. It seemed like an operational issue but it is not that at all. It is about the management of weekly budgets day by day in families that can blow apart because of debt. Anybody who thinks that we are short of debt, especially in the household income strata of below £10,000 a year, is completely wrong and should look at the evidence referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, about the payday loans and the extent to which people rely on week-to-week, month-to-month emergency packages, paying Peter and paying Paul on different days and trying to survive in the middle. It is a great skill, which some people are forced to exercise. It causes enormous pressure, which is normally borne by the women in the household. We have to be careful how we typify some of the caricatures within families, but in my experience it is the womenfolk who have to make the difference between Tuesday and Friday, which is not always easy. Often they go short of food in trying. That is the reality.

How do I know that? In 2009 the payment system went from weekly to fortnightly, which caused enormous difficulty. It is not that long ago, so we do not really know what the impact of that change has been. If in 2011 we are considering going from weekly to monthly, we are talking about an entirely different regime of family budgets and people keeping their households together. It is symptomatic of how we treat the 15 per cent of the caseload that will be affected and will struggle with this. I encourage the Minister, who is absolutely correct to be ambitious for this new reform. He has lots of ideas and is a master of the technology to the extent that Ministers have not been before in terms of what he is trying to do. I absolutely support the jam jar accounts, sophisticated bank accounts and applications that go on my iPad so that if I ever need income support I will be fine. But I do not believe that the 15 per cent of the family households at the bottom end of the income distribution will be anywhere near using these things comfortably.

For me, this is a litmus test issue; it is not a trivial, operational matter. It is not safe to have anything in the legislation other than payment being fortnightly. Anything else is a bonus. By paying universal credit fortnightly there is a chance of being safe and dealing with the 15 per cent of the household distribution that we are talking about. If we do not get the system to work for the lower end of the household income distribution, we will fail the people who need it most, so it is not a sensible policy to be considering. Lots of imaginative things have been talked about and I am in favour of them all, but they are a fudge. We are making it potentially much more difficult for people who cannot manage day-to-day budgets from week to week.

The other thing that I have great fears about is that, no matter how many jam jars there are in your bank account, it is all arrestable. My Scots law might be slightly out of date but a long time ago—to my shame—I used to work for the South of Scotland Electricity Board, arresting people’s wages. In those days, you had to go to the sheriff to get the account properly closed down and the supply cut off. Those days are thankfully now gone, but you can still pend and arrest bank accounts. If I am owed money and I know somebody is getting a monthly payment of all their benefit under one wrapper called universal credit, I will be waiting at the counter of the bank and I will slap an injunction on them and they will have no money at all.

There must be some safety mechanism to protect these essential monthly payments. You might get away with surviving fortnight to fortnight if one fortnightly payment is made, but just think of the pressure and difficulty for families who have annual incomes that rely on universal credit if somebody arrests their Co-operative account or whatever it is that the Minister is thinking of. These are not straightforward issues and this is not a small matter. Unless the Minister can persuade me that this will adequately serve the 15 per cent of the caseload at the bottom end of the income distribution, this House would be sensible to require fortnightly payment to be put in the primary legislation.