Universal Credit (Standard Allowance Entitlement of Care Leavers) Bill [HL]

Lord Palmer of Childs Hill Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 17th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD)]

My Lords, first, I must compliment the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester on bringing this Bill forward and eloquently supporting it in his opening speech.

I listened to my noble friend Lady Benjamin, who was right to stress the point about carers leaving for adulthood and the need for financial stability, which is not that clear. The noble Lord, Lord Davies, rightly spoke about the moral issue. We tend to deal in pounds and pence all the time, but there are morals as well; we ought to be aware of our moral responsibilities to those people in society who are less fortunate.

We on these Benches clearly support this Private Member’s Bill but, like so many Bills, it does not go far enough. That is easy to say, but we maybe start with small things and go on to more. Under-25s receive £81.77 less per month in universal credit, because the assumption is that they can call on support from family members, but do they in fact receive that support? Are they actually required to pay their very reduced universal credit into the family coffers? There are responsibilities for everybody, and the people leaving care have that problem.

What are we actually concerned about? We are concerned about people slipping through the holes in society. As has been said, this is a real moral issue. Again, I stress that we should extend the full rate of universal credit to under-25s from care—I would welcome this—but they should not receive less than the full rate anyway because people have costs. As my noble friend Lady Benjamin said, the idea is to give people both financial stability and the fact that they are paying for themselves.

There will, of course, be a cost to the public purse for Ministers, but so many of these assumed costs to the public purse are not the whole story. We saw this with the winter fuel allowance: here was a wonderful way to cut down benefits, via the winter fuel allowance, but a Government Minister said very clearly that they welcomed the big increase in people claiming supplementary benefits, which meant that they could then claim the winter fuel allowance, and therefore there was no economy of any size, if at all. Here, by depriving these young people of a small sum of money—and it is a small sum—we are not behaving in a moral manner.

I was rather taken by comments I read such as, “I would have had more stability and not been in debt if my mental health would have been better”, and “It would mean that care leavers may have food on the table and they are more likely to likely to be fed and more likely to be able to have some heating on in this freezing weather”. It could go towards food, and care leavers could be more motivated to go to college or even see a friend”.

Many care leavers have said they were resorting to borrowing money to enable them to meet essential costs. As most care leavers have limited credit histories and many are either out of work or in very low paid jobs, access to lower-cost credit is very limited. Many therefore find themselves resorting to high-cost lenders, often getting trapped into a debt cycle that is difficult to escape. This brings us back to the moral issue of not treating people as people whom we respect.

Support for the Bill should be very strong in your Lordships’ House. It is, as with so many Private Members’ Bills, a Bill of two pages. We do not have a lot of amendments, subsections, schedules and the like. In fact, there is very little in the Bill—it just says, basically, this is a moral issue and we should deal with it. That is how we should take it, and I hope the Government will make time for the Bill and do an impact study on how much would be saved and how much it would cost to be more expansive with universal credit for all youngsters under the age of 25. From these Benches, we support the Bill and hope that as it progresses it might cover wider areas of interest.