Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 13th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I fully support the primary purpose of this Bill, subject to the proviso that these measures are for one year only. The Government’s message to pensioners is clear: we support you and we will take account of your circumstances—for example, if you are on pension credit.

I echo my noble friend Lord Freud and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham in their implicit suggestion that this Bill also serves another important purpose. For me, as a disabled person, it provides the Government with the perfect opportunity to send a similar message of support to disabled people: namely, that we will support you to live your life independently and to realise your potential. My fear is that, by removing the £20 per week uplift to universal credit, or UC, the Government are sending the opposite message. We risk saying to almost half a million disabled households—according to figures from the Legatum Institute—that we do not actually care if you are plunged into poverty.

I welcome this opportunity to congratulate the Minister for Disabled People, Chloe Smith, on her appointment to her new role, but I do not envy her the task that she has inherited. I am referring, of course, to the aftermath of the publication of the Government’s National Disability Strategy. As missed opportunities go, I am afraid that it does not get much bigger. The strategy was an opportunity to reset completely the Government’s relationship with disabled people. Regrettably, it was squandered. The strategy was little more than yet another list of planned consultations, reviews and half-hearted commitments.

A commission which I chaired, made up of senior businesspeople from the private sector, academics and disability rights campaigners, produced a report specifically to feed into the strategy. Our report contained well over 100 exhaustively researched and oven-ready measures. The title of the report was Now Is the Time. In response, the title of the Government’s strategy might just as well have been “Now Is Not the Time”—not the time for equality of opportunity, not the time for ambition and not the time for the promised transformation of the lives of the UK’s more than 14 million disabled people.

I put it to my noble friend the Minister that now is indeed the time, in this Bill, to, at the very least, offer some reassurance to disabled people that their concerns about the end of the UC uplift have been heard and are being addressed.

Research to which I have referred shows that, of the 840,000 households projected to fall back into poverty by the ending of the UC uplift, 450,000—over half—include a disabled adult or child. Given that disabled people make up only 20% of the population, the impact of the removal of the UC uplift on disabled people is so disproportionate that it practically beggars belief. So I ask my noble friend the Minister if an impact assessment was done specifically on this, and, if so, that she put a copy in the Library. If one was not carried out, I would be very grateful if she could say why not.

The Government need to join the dots and decide what message they want disabled people to hear. I applaud the Prime Minister’s levelling-up vision of giving everyone the chance to realise their potential. Of course he is right, but is that what disabled people are actually hearing in practice when they are hit by the double whammy of the end of the UC uplift and the increase in tax if they are in work? Is that the message that they are getting from a national disability strategy, spun to the media with the headline figure of £1.6 billion—less than 1% of which is actually new money—which lacks a road map towards the measurable outcome of equality of opportunity? For me, as a Conservative, that surely must be our goal, rather than damaging the legacy to which my noble friend Lord Freud referred.

In conclusion, the Government need to seize the opportunity that this Bill presents to reset their relationship with disabled people, starting with a rethink of the impact on them in particular of the end of the UC uplift. I look forward to my noble friend’s response.

Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 26th October 2021 Lords Chamber

This is not just about whether an amendment is in scope. It is about whether democracy is in scope. We should keep an open mind. I was glad to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Freud, that those who tabled the amendment will not press it to a vote this evening. We want to see what will happen tomorrow in the Statement that will be made in another place. We will then wait with anticipation to see what happens on Report. Despite the lateness of the hour, I congratulate the noble Baroness on bringing this amendment to us this evening and initiating this extraordinarily important debate.

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I remember being in the Chamber just under five years ago when your Lordships’ House was united in paying tribute to my noble friend Lord Freud on the occasion of his final speech as Minister for Welfare Reform. Hansard cols. 1697 to 1720 of 21 December 2016 paid testament to the esteem in which my noble friend is held. I join other noble Lords in thanking him and my noble friend Lady Stroud for their courage and tenacity both in their previous, pivotal positions in driving welfare reform and also for tabling what I regard as a crucial amendment, which we are considering this evening. So the question that I would be grateful if my noble friend the Minister would answer is: if we listened to my noble friend Lord Freud when he was a Minister, why should we not listen to him today? What has changed?

I shall briefly address this from the perspective of a disabled person. Disabled people have been disproportionately hit by the pandemic. Perhaps the biggest change since has been the recent significant and growing increase in the cost of living, to which other noble Lords have alluded. For those disabled people in particular who cannot work, the calamitous impact of the removal of the universal credit uplift, just as their need for support is growing, could hardly have been worse timed. For them, the impact of Covid—for which the uplift was introduced—not only endures but has increased considerably. It is completely fatuous to pretend otherwise.

Of course, I do not blame the Government for increases in the cost of living. It is not the Government’s fault that heating bills have risen by 12% and are expected to continue rising as we head into winter. Nor is it their fault that petrol now costs £1.43 per litre—an all-time high—and that prices at the pump are also predicted to increase further. But that does not mean that the Government can deny their responsibility to mitigate the real hardship faced by those disabled people who are unable to work and need the universal credit uplift now more than ever.

As a Conservative, I of course support efforts to bring the deficit under control but, as a disabled person, I suggest that that Conservative principle needs to go hand in hand with pragmatism. In conclusion, only MPs can fully appreciate the implications of ignoring the universal credit uplift crisis, for the simple reason that it is their severely disabled constituents and their families who are being hardest hit. They deserve the opportunity to vote to protect their most vulnerable constituents. As we have heard, this amendment would simply give them the chance to choose whether they want to take that opportunity. I urge the Government to think again and thereby make this amendment unnecessary. That is in the Government’s gift.

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, for bringing this amendment to the House, together with the noble Lord, Lord Freud, and other noble Lords. They have done it in entirely the appropriate way, in recognition that there is a Budget tomorrow and other opportunities to take this whole debate forward. I have been very struck by the arguments on both sides and how well they were balanced and expressed. But I take the point of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that the rules may not be quite as clear cut as they appear to be, that people will bend, expand or do something with the envelope as they see fit, and that this area needs much more discussion. I particularly agree with him on the planning laws, for example.

I want to make one substantive point which I do not think has been made yet, about the effect of this cut on health. I spent a lot of time recently in some of the poorer communities in the country working on health. In doing so, I have recognised, as we all have, the fragility of some people’s lives and the balances they need to strike to make things work. This may well knock many people on into poverty, as the noble Baroness has said. It will have an impact on physical and mental health and on other public services, and it will be damaging in the long term for society, not just for the people involved.

We have already heard one great paradox: how costly it is to be poor, and how you pay more. There is another great paradox, which is that quite a lot of cost-saving measures end up costing other budgets rather more.