Financial Guidance and Claims Bill [HL]

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 5th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Drake. She makes such wise and thoughtful speeches, and having her experience available to the House is a great advantage to us all. Her speech will repay careful study.

I welcome the new Minister to her Augean stables. She did very well in explaining the outline of the Bill. I think this will be quite difficult because the Long Title is quite constrained. I want to spend a moment looking at the politics, as I see it, of a subject that has an emerging salience. I welcome the Bill and concur with nearly everything said by both Opposition Front Benches—by my noble friend Lord Sharkey who has studied these things for a while and the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, who has been around this subject for a long time. I look forward to contributing to the Committee stage, which will no doubt go on for about three months because the Government have no other business.

I am particularly pleased to spy a stranger in the shape and form of Mr Guy Opperman. Noble Lords may not have noticed that he has been here since the beginning of the debate. That is to his credit. If he has any sense he will pay attention to what goes on here. I would like to think that he will find quite a lot more content here than in the other place. He has a key, important job. It is a difficult one because he is doing pensions as well in his spare time.

The point I want to make more than any other is that over the period of this Parliament we want to be in a particular place with financial inclusion. The noble Baroness, Lady Drake, mentioned the vision necessary across all government departments. I was a member of the ad hoc Financial Exclusion Committee, and we look forward to the government response to the 22 recommendations we made. They were wide-ranging, taking us well beyond the Long Title of this Bill. At the heart of our report we said that what Mr Opperman really needs is a Cabinet committee to drive this agenda. He deserves that, having been here for more than an hour. It is the least we can do, and I support that.

We need somebody who gets up in the morning thinking about how various bits of government fit in, including the Treasury, to shape strategy. My fear is that if this Bill is all there is then Mr Opperman will have a quite difficult job using the tools in it alone to get the vision and success I hope he will enjoy. I must say that pensions Ministers used to be ten a penny before Sir Steve Webb came on stream, so Mr Opperman will have to watch his back. I wish him well and long service. I hope he does well as this is an important job. We will follow his progress with interest.

The Financial Inclusion Commission has been a fantastic eye-opener in terms of the significance and increasing salience of the subject. I have been here for 34 years. As my noble friend Lord Sharkey said in his excellent speech, the shape of debt has changed. In the old days people used to have bank overdrafts and so on. In my former constituency I would get regular briefings from Citizens Advice. It was pretty straightforward. People got immense assistance in getting themselves and their households out of difficulty from the informal Citizens Advice service that used to exist. It was done by volunteers, who all deserve MBEs, in my view, but there are quite a few of them so that would be hard to do. Citizens Advice was able to save households from the financial pressure building up and destroying families. I saw that myself. Rather obviously, I am not as close to it now as I was. My noble friend Lord Sharkey is absolutely correct that we are now seeing people unable to pay their council tax or rent. Utility debts bring even greater dangers to households in terms of how people get themselves out of trouble. We need to recognise that.

On top of that, the extent and severity of the problem are increasing. I am a natural pessimist—you have to be a pessimist to be a Liberal Democrat—and I am absolutely certain that this problem is going to get worse during this Parliament, for reasons that other people have explained. Having a few new functions and a new, single body is a very good idea—it is a step forward. The Prime Minister was very welcoming. On the steps of No. 10, she said all the right things about “just about managing” and I thought that that made perfect sense, but by itself this Bill will not do all of that. If it is a first step, that is great, but we will be looking for other political developments, and that involves resources.

When the Financial Inclusion Taskforce was set up by Brian Pomeroy some years back, a small budget—I think it was something like £20 million a year—over a short period of time completely transformed the lives of a number of people in the United Kingdom who were unbanked. You can make a case for small amounts of money—resources well targeted through a body that knows what it is doing—very easily. It does not take huge resources but it needs more than we have at the moment.

I agree that there is a concern about the ability to keep the advice holistic. Other Members of the House know more about that than I do, but there is a confusion that we have an opportunity in this Bill to try to bottom out. That is very important.

I want to underscore the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, about the relationship with Scotland. It is not just in CDCs, it is in the debt side of the Bill as well. Ministers’ responsibilities include talking regularly and frequently with their counterparts in other jurisdictions in the United Kingdom and I hope that that will be added to the list of ministerial responsibilities and will be given due time.

I look forward to the Committee stage of the Bill. The difficulty I think we are going to have is that I would like to pursue the breathing space idea that StepChange has come up with; again, I think it was my noble friend Lord Sharkey who mentioned this. It is already in place in Scotland under a statutory debt arrangement scheme and it works very well. It was, after all, in the Conservative manifesto. I do not think it will be easy for us to change the statutory shape of the Bill in that kind of direction. Some of us are quite clever about insinuating the debate even if you cannot make the amendment selectable, but we will try to behave and do what we can to raise some of these important issues.

I declare my interest as a member of the advisory board of a company called Neyber. It has impressed me enormously by setting up employer-related schemes for short-term, low-cost interest and credit deals for employees. I do not get a fee for the advisory board, but I have learned an enormous amount about what can be done with a sympathetic, usually larger scale, employer in terms of knowing its employees and helping them to stay out of the clutches of loan sharks. There are lots of ideas of that kind, including using the auto-enrolment-type pension process to try to increase low-level household savings and get in place the important cushion to which the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, referred.

There are a lot of things that I would like to try to talk about in Committee. It might be difficult because of the constraints of the Marshalled List and the Long Title, but I look forward very much to Committee. I agree with noble Lords who welcomed the Minister’s approach in making officials and the Bill team available to Members who are interested in trying to improve the Bill. With the pool of talent we have around the Chamber, I will be disappointed if we cannot do a little to help her improve the Bill as it goes through its stages in the House of Lords.