Queen’s Speech

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it is pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Hudnall, and I agree wholeheartedly with the majority of her speech, particularly her final point supporting the BBC. I am very pleased to take part in this debate. I am deeply relieved. The ministerial appointment that I was looking for most after the election was that of the noble Lord, Lord Freud, because without him universal credit would be in a much worse place than it is now. He still has a job on his hands, but I am really grateful for and encouraged by his return. I was even more encouraged—if I can put it that way—by the addition to the ministerial team of the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann. She must not give up her campaigning zeal in her Twitter feed. If any departmental official tries to turn the noble Baroness’s gas to a small peep—and knowing her as I do I know it would be a brave person who did that—they would doing the nation a great disservice. I hope she will continue to inform her followers as she has been doing over the past few years. She has an important role in pensions, and we look forward to working with her in future.

I want to lay down a couple of markers about things that I think are really important. The theme of the Queen’s Speech that came through to me was the desire of the new Government to develop a one-nation approach, and that is correct. It is certainly correct coming from a Scot who experienced the election. I have done 10 now, one way and another, and it was in many ways one of the hardest, and not for just the most obvious reason. I found the tenor of the background environment very difficult, and there are some problems there that the Government will need to deal with.

I want to spend my restricted time looking at how a one-nation approach can be applied to low-income families. It is true, and the noble Lord, Lord Freud, knows this, that active labour markets are the obvious first port of call for getting people off benefits and into work, but there are now many more working households in poverty. We must not forget that, and I fear that sometimes we do. I am looking the Minister straight in the eye when I say that the prospect of £12,000 million cuts annually over a two-year period when we still do not know the full cumulative effect of the cuts in the previous Parliament is deeply worrying.

In 2012, the Minister oversaw the Committee stage of the Welfare Reform Bill in a masterly way which improved the Bill, but it was not helped by financial privilege being thrown at us from the other place. I hope he will adopt that approach—as much as he can because I am not stupid and know that all this is Treasury-driven—in trying to explain in good time to Members from all sides of the House the options that are being canvassed and give us a chance to think about them, reflect and give him both publicly and privately our views about how they can be done. I think two years is impossible. Trying to do this by 2017 is just impossible. In a powerful speech, the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, referred to the fact that there is a smaller pool of benefit recipients from which we are deriving this saving. It just is not safe. I promise the Minister that my colleagues and I will work with him as energetically as we are allowed. The leader of our group, my noble and learned friend Lord Wallace of Tankerness, was right to say that of course the Government have a manifesto commitment to make the saving, but they do not have any Salisbury protection for individual benefit cuts. So I say to the Minister that I will be looking to him to return to his positive and consultative approach to try to make the best of what I think will be a very bad job.

As I said earlier, I do not think that universal credit would have got past the first reset if the noble Lord had not been the Minister in charge, and I know that he is still engaged in it. People forget that the 2010 coalition settlement was based on the idea that universal credit would already be in place and helping low-income households at the margins of worklessness and benefit receipt. At the moment it is available to only 50,000 families; I know why that is, but too often we forget—certainly as far as I was concerned—that by 2015 the 2010 deal should have seen hundreds of thousands of families benefiting from universal credit, and they are not.

I urge the Minister to make as much progress as he can. People are losing confidence in this programme. The department has managed 30 significant policy changes over the past five years, with 18% less resource in the departmental expenditure limit. Most of that has worked, but universal credit is still at risk and, sadly, coming from Scotland, I know that people are beginning to lose confidence in it. We really need to concentrate on universal credit.

My final thought is that I look again to the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, to work with the Treasury on this. I have just finished a fascinating session with Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles on the need for financial inclusion, and an element of that is necessary to deal with the digital divide in universal credit. Can the department please work with the Treasury in future to try to get financial inclusion more broadly based across the United Kingdom so we can ensure that people can get the full advantage of universal credit when it is rolled out across the country?