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.