Benefits: Reductions

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, for securing this debate. I will focus my remarks on universal credit as it affects disabled people. However, first I join other noble Lords in paying warm tribute to Baroness Hollis of Heigham. No one could doubt her passionate commitment and her expert knowledge of the system. I think the House misses her deeply.

More than one-third of claimants moving on to universal credit—UC as it is more generally known—through a process of managed migration will be disabled people, so it is crucial that the Government get the regulations governing managed migration right, and I look forward to seeing the recommendations of the Social Security Advisory Committee on the regulations and the Government’s response shortly.

Notwithstanding that, it is important to reassure disabled claimants that the Government are determined not only that UC should be a success, but that UC should help most those who need most help. That is why I welcome the fact that around 1 million disabled people will gain, on average, £110 more a month through UC. I also welcome the fact that the severe disability premium transitional payment rates reflect the extra financial support provided through the more generous limited capability for work-related activity component. Indeed, the rate for these UC claimants is significantly higher, at £328.32 a month, than £163.15 per month on the equivalent employment and support allowance support group. Targeting support to the most vulnerable through the severe disability premium will benefit 500,000 people.

I also take comfort from the way the Government are listening and acting in response to issues raised by colleagues in the other place, such as the well-respected champion of social justice Iain Duncan Smith, who has publicly welcomed the Budget announcements on UC. The Government’s “test and learn” approach is surely wise because it allows them to make improvements to the system as it gradually rolls out. Changing the start date of the process of managed migration from January to July 2019 and focusing initially on a limited number of claimants should also provide reassurance to those who may be under the misleading impression that change will happen overnight. It is not.

As I spent nearly all of my working life in the charity sector before I entered your Lordships’ House, I have seen first-hand the excellent work that it does. I was therefore pleased to learn that the DWP is going to fund Citizens Advice to provide universal support to help those claimants who find the transition to UC challenging—for example, if they struggle to use online services. This is an excellent idea, and I encourage my noble friend and her fellow Ministers at the DWP to explore how other charities with a recognisable, trusted brand can help mitigate disabled people’s concerns about transition—for example, by contacting those who have not responded to successive communications, whether written or by phone, from the DWP.

I shall finish with a general point, which I have arrived at having listened to various contributions from the Benches opposite which I found really depressing because they were made in a vacuum of ideological deficit denial and a total inability to accept responsibility for the high level of debt that the profligacy of Gordon Brown visited upon this country as an enduring legacy of his spending. I simply say that that would become so much worse under the Marxist McDonnell Chancellor if Labour were to win the next general election.

My final point is that a failure to tackle that and to reduce the deficit poses the single greatest threat to disabled people’s security. When the welfare system becomes unsustainable, those who need the most help are the most vulnerable. Disabled people like me do not have the most to gain from reckless debt-creating spending. We have the most to lose.