Welfare Reform Bill

Lord McKenzie of Luton Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I will detain the House only very briefly, but I feel I should say a word of support, having put my name to this amendment, put down by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson.

I wish to say just three things. First, we have heard that the effect of these cuts is really quite severe. The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, is correct: parents could find themselves losing up to £1,400 a year, even if they have a family with just one disabled child. That is a very significant loss.

Secondly, the case for doing this is weak. The only case that I have heard over money is about alignment with adults. We have heard a very compelling argument from the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, as to how that simply is not the case.

Finally, there is the question of money. I understand that the Government have said that the cuts are not intended to save money but to redistribute it, so that the money saved by these cuts will be used to raise the level of support for adults in the support group. This amendment lays down a marker; by saying that the support given to disabled children cannot be reduced below the current level, it makes the Government think again about that particular brand of rough justice. There is no particular reason why, in making these redistributions, disabled children should be asked to pay for money that is being given to other groups of disabled people. This amendment is not seeking an investment of billions of pounds; it is simply laying down a marker and saying that, when decisions are being taken, this group cannot be expected to bear that cost.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

My Lords, we support Amendment 4, so comprehensively moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and spoken to by a number of noble Lords who are very knowledgeable about these issues. It deals with just part of the inequity introduced by the restructuring of support for disabled people: that affecting families with children. We will debate further issues affecting disabled adults and the removal of the severe disability premium in due course.

Like other speakers, I welcome proposals to increase, over time, the levels of benefit for those in the support group, but we do not think that this should be paid for by drastic cuts in support provided for families with disabled children. Leaving aside transitional protection, my figure is that some 200,000 could lose £27 per week. Whether it is 100,000 or 200,000, it is many children indeed.

We have heard about transitional protection, particularly from the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, but transitional protection is of no use to new claimants. It might stop you losing what you have, but it does not help if you are claiming for the first time. As it is a cash protection it will in any case reduce in real terms over time. Transitional protection will also cease on change of circumstances—the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, pursued this point—and we have yet to receive clarity on quite what this means.

We are told that the restructuring of these benefits is to simplify the system and that aligning the rates of support for adults and children will ease the transition for disabled children into adulthood, but how does the Minister respond to the point that there is not true alignment? There is also the issue that the gateways are different: for adults it is the WCA process; for children, as now, it is via the DLA. Children who are severely visually impaired will receive the higher addition—a move that we welcome—but it is by no means certain that adults who are severely visually impaired will be allocated to the support group under the WCA. Furthermore, as the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, pointed out, disability disregards in the universal credit proposals add to the support for adults.

In Committee, we had some knowledgeable contributions from noble Lords about the costs that families with disabled children face. We know that families with disabled children are disproportionately likely to be living in poverty. In Committee, we heard the very personal experiences of the noble Lord, Lord Wigley. We also heard detailed analysis. We have heard further details today from the noble Baronesses, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Campbell, and my noble friend Lady Wilkins. I shall list some of the potential extra costs faced by families: heating, which is a big issue; sensory equipment; special toys; special diet; transport; extra and special clothing; and help with siblings, who will not have their parents’ time and attention. To this must be added the lost opportunity for parents—or at least for one of them—to work.

For those in work, costs can be higher because of the increased costs associated with care and transport for disabled children. Those costs do not only or most heavily fall on families with the most disabled children—that point was tellingly made by the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell. As framed, the amendment need not have overall cost implications for the Government, but it would of course cause a rethink of the restructuring, a restructuring that currently redistributes resources away from children and towards adults.

Reversing a benefit loss of £27 a week for some of the neediest families in our country must be a priority. Failure to do so will inevitably increase poverty at a time when the Government are reneging on their commitment to upgrade the child element of the child tax credit by more than inflation—a measure that they proclaimed in their 2010 Budget would ensure that effects on child poverty would be statistically insignificant but that is a cloak that they can no longer hide behind.

If the noble Baroness is minded to test the opinion of the House, we will support her on the amendment.

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[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

Can the noble Lord say by when he expects to have moved to that figure of £77 for adults?

[Lord Freud]

As we move people on to the universal credit and take people off the other systems we will be gradually putting people on to that amount. But I am better off writing to the noble Lord on that particular matter of timing because it is quite a complicated equation. Basically, we are looking to maintain an overall fixed level of spend in this area, and as we pull down one element we can move up the other elements—that is essentially what is happening, so there is a periodicity there.

We are trying to get money to the most severely disabled in our community. There is a real decision here: maintaining the existing rates for children without doing that—without finding this money—would cost an extra £200 million a year. I simply do not have that money. If this amendment is passed, it will not be possible to increase the addition for the most severely disabled people to £77. So there is a decision to be made here: do you agree with the way we want to rebalance the system—

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord again, but is it not right that that equation only follows if you look at those two together? You do not have to operate within that envelope; there are other envelopes, as my noble friend Lady Sherlock mentioned in her contribution.

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[Lord German]

My Lords, I do not intend to turn my back on what I said in Committee; in fact, I intend to repeat some of it, so I hope that noble Lords will bear with me. If you believe that council tax benefit is a universal benefit and part of the social security system, clearly you need to ensure that it is delivered everywhere within our country and on a uniform basis so that people will know the rules and the benefit they are going to get.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, has talked about England, but I want to talk, as noble Lords know I frequently do, about the other parts of the United Kingdom that will also be affected by this. I start with a big question to the Minister. He wrote to me about this issue when I asked him how it would work in Wales and Scotland. I was told that the money would be given with a 10 per cent saving—that is a crucial sentence because we can reflect on that and on how we can manage the budget within a council tax benefit structure—and that the saving would be given to the devolved Administrations to enable them to bring forward their own arrangements for help with council tax.

The next sentence was about the powers that they would need to bring forward their own arrangements for help with council tax, and it says that these arrangements must fall within existing competence. This is a crucial question; if there is one thing that I know about, it is that the demand for competence is very important. Clearly it is not primary competence because it is not primary legislation that is being transferred, but executive devolution powers must be being given to both the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly to be able to achieve that. I would like to know which executive powers have been given, because both Scotland and Wales could refuse to have those powers, which would be a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do. If they think that this is not something that they can manage or want to do, they can refuse to take those competences.

Even if Scotland were to accept those powers, and I have made this point in Committee, I wonder what game we would be playing into in Scotland alone. Remember that the basis of the Scotland Bill that is before your Lordships’ House is that social security should not be devolved; it is part of the glue that holds the United Kingdom together. Say that you do not give the social security competence but you obviously give some competence to the Scottish Government. If you give them that money, my guess, and it is purely a guess, is that they will take the money, convert it by putting a bit of Alex Salmond paste on top of it and make it into a Scottish system. They will then use that as an argument to say, “If you think you want a social security system in Scotland but that we can’t cope with it, here we are, doing a better job than they are in England”. There is a danger to the unity of the United Kingdom in this matter, which is why we ought to consider very seriously what the effects of this change will be.

I am told that Clause 11 gives powers to take the competences back. There is no doubt that there is considerable anguish about this matter, but if you believe that it is a universal system, surely it makes sense to use the funding as part of the universal benefit but also to take the hit that has to come with the budget reduction. After all, if the DCLG is going to be able to allocate the money with the budget reduction, that budget reduction could just as easily be done by the DWP. Obviously it would not be a nice, friendly or comfortable process, but as with all levers you have not damaged the social security structure of this country at the same time.

My question to the Minister is this: if you are to retrieve these competences from Wales and Scotland, which competences are you retrieving, and where does Clause 11 give the power to the other place to bring back the powers into the social security structure? The most important feature that we have to decide here in your Lordships’ House is whether it is better placed, with the appropriate cut, inside the universal credit or inside a social security system for our country as a whole, or whether we wish absolutely and once and for all to abolish council tax credit and have what might be called a local support scheme in whatever the local authority can provide with the money that is provided for it if you cannot even call it a benefit.

I worry greatly about this prospect, and I ask my noble friend the Minister to reassure me that we can bring this back and to tell me how we can bring it back and how we get it back from Scotland and Wales.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

My Lords, we support this amendment, and consider, as my noble friend Baroness Hollis does, that council tax benefit should be dealt with as part of the universal credit.

My noble friend delivered a devastating critique of the proposal in Committee and has done so again today. Indeed, I thought I saw the Minister nod in approval at one stage. If he did not nod in approval at my noble friend, perhaps he did for the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Newton.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

He welcomed it.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

Very good. Of course, this issue is having to be considered, as has been said, against the backdrop of the overall funding for council tax benefit being reduced by 10 per cent but with commitments to protect awards of council tax support for pensioners and possibly for other vulnerable groups. This means, as has been said, that support for working age claimants is to be squeezed dramatically.

The consultation on this proposition, the Localism Bill, closed two months ago, and perhaps we can know when the Government’s response to this will be forthcoming. Quite apart from the administrative consequences of the proposed localism of the benefit, there is, as my noble friend pointed out, a fundamental difference compared with what happens currently. Under present arrangements, council tax benefit is demand led. Whatever the calculation shows is due is made available to the claimant, by offset against the council tax bill, with full reimbursement from the DWP. It is, as my noble friend explained, the AME—annually managed expenditure—bit of government spending.

This will in effect change under a localised system. If claims under a localised system exceed the budgetary amount locally, authorities will have much more limited resources from which to meet the increased demand. They might dip into reserves, if they have any, or they might make the system less generous in a subsequent period. They might switch expenditure from other local authority spend, but given the savage cuts to local authority budgets that have been made recently, there does not seem to be much room for manoeuvre to do that.

It is suggested that local authorities might approach a localised system on some consortium basis, and therefore that other local authorities will help out. I suggest that the prospects for this are not strong. One consequence of these constraints will be that local authorities will inevitably budget on a prudent basis, building in contingencies that will further diminish the resources available to claimants of a localised system. That indeed is what the risk assessment will dictate.

The main reason advanced by the Minister, Grant Shapps MP, in evidence to the CLG Committee for the localisation of council tax benefit was that for local authorities,

“the big advantage is that they will have a stake for the first time in what people who live in those homes are doing; in other words, an incentive to help get the person back into work”.

This is a rather strange view: that it takes possible savings from a benefit pot for local authorities to have an incentive to help people back to work. It is a view that ignores, or is ignorant of, the proactive and imaginative work that many local authorities do to help local residents into work. However, in any event, the driver for having clear incentives to support work is supposed to be the universal credit itself. If there is any incentive in the system, there is a risk that local take-up campaigns will diminish, as any wider take-up will come from the resources of the council.

We have yet to know how much central direction there will be for a localised system. If the Government run true to form, there will be quite a lot. This was certainly the outcome of the Localism Bill, which espoused localism and gave additional powers to local authorities but came with lots of strings attached, as the noble Lord, Lord Newton, will recall, despite some of those strings being removed in your Lordships’ House. There will clearly have to be central direction if the position of pensioners is to be protected, and some form of direction to deal with tapers and work incentives.

We understand, to follow the line of questioning by the noble Lord, Lord German, that the Minister will say that he cannot support a change to the universal credit to include a council tax benefit now. However, there is nothing to stop it being included in the future, as the Bill now stands. If this is the Government’s position, will the Minister confirm that he considers that regulations under Clause 11 will be the route to effect this?

The noble Lord, Lord German, also raised some fascinating questions about how this works for Wales and Scotland. Can the Minister say whether the proposition that he will advance tonight will be, “Don’t worry about it now—you can get it all back in due course.”? What changes would have to be made to the systems that are currently being built to put this into effect? Including council tax support as part of universal credit is of course not without its challenges, particularly the payment issue, so perhaps we can hear whether there has been any thinking around that matter.

However, we support my noble friend’s strong contention that the sensible, practical and principled way to deal with council tax benefit is to include it as part of universal credit. We believe that the Minister, a very logical person, must have come to the same conclusion. If a strong vote today will help his cause, we are more than prepared to play our part.

[Lord Freud]

Beware Greeks. My Lords, noble Lords will be aware from previous debates that we are proposing to abolish council tax benefit before the introduction of universal credit and replace it with local schemes of support. Localising support for council tax is part of a wider policy of decentralisation, which will give councils increased financial autonomy and a greater stake in the economic future of their local area. Localisation also reintroduces the link between council tax levels and the costs of providing support, thus reinforcing local financial accountability.

This reform will give local authorities a significant degree of control over how a 10 per cent reduction in expenditure on the current council tax benefit bill is achieved, enabling them to balance local priorities and their own financial circumstances as they see fit. This saving is an important contribution to the Government’s vital programme of deficit reduction. We need to ensure that localisation supports the improved work incentives that universal credit will bring. However, the Government believe that the key principles required to incentivise work can be delivered through local schemes with the help of technical guidance provided by central government. Local authorities will have a greater stake in getting people back into work than ever before.

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Scotland and Wales already have the executive powers to establish schemes based on applying discounts to council tax. I can assure my noble friend that social security remains absolutely reserved as a UK matter and that localisation funding does not affect this. I thank the noble Baroness for raising these issues.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

My Lords, perhaps the noble Lord would reiterate a point. I thought I heard him say that a Bill for the localisation of council tax benefits or whatever it is called will be introduced in this Session. Does he have any more precise detail?

[Lord Freud]

I am afraid that I do not have any more precise detail but, although I do not think that in the consideration of the Welfare Reform Bill I can say soon, I can probably say that it will be between January and May or June, or something like that. I have no more precise information.