Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Third sitting)
Stephen Timms Excerpts(8 years, 8 months ago)
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The Chair
Thank you, Kate; that is good to know. I know that Stephen Timms has three questions for the panellists.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
Q 162 Welcome to the witnesses.
Obviously, in the background to what this Bill does in relation to the Child Poverty Act is the controversy about how child poverty should be measured. Everyone recognises that it is quite a difficult subject. Indeed, the Prime Minister himself has argued both in favour of and, more recently, against the use of a relative poverty measure.
I wanted to ask each of the three witnesses to comment on three particular points. First, the Bill deletes all the targets around child poverty—there will be no targets left if the Bill is enacted in its current form—and I am interested to know whether each of you thinks that there should be some target around child poverty set by Government, or do you agree that removing every target entirely is appropriate?
Secondly, the Child Poverty Act requires tracking four measures, all of them related to poverty—relative poverty, absolute poverty, persistent child poverty and material deprivation—but this Bill replaces that with a requirement to publish data on children in workless households and educational attainment. I wonder what each of you thinks about the validity of those alternative indicators for assessing and measuring what is happening to children, compared with the measures in the Child Poverty Act. Thirdly—
The Chair
Shall we come to the third one in a moment? Professor Gordon has just arrived. If we ask the first two questions first, then everyone can answer the third one—or are they so linked that they must be taken together?
The Chair
Professor Gordon, welcome.
Professor Gordon: Thank you. Sorry, I went to the wrong Committee Room.
The Chair
Well, you have come to the right place now, and we are very grateful. I think you will catch up on what the questions are, then you can give your answers and we can have the third question. Mr Padley first, please.
Matt Padley: Taking the first question—should there be a target—from my point of view, that relates to whether or not there is a strategy through which to reduce child poverty, and targets related to that. If targets prevent or get in the way of doing things that actually reduce child poverty, then they are not useful. What I am saying is that the targets have to be useful and have to measure the right things.
If I can answer the second question at the same time, the measures of related worklessness and educational attainment as proposed are not necessarily measures of child poverty. It is entirely possible for households to move from worklessness to work, for instance, without necessarily moving out of low income. It is important to stress that they are not necessarily measuring what they purport to measure. I think that that relates to the first question, so my view would be that if there are targets, they need to be part of a plan of how to tackle child poverty. That is missing from the Bill as proposed.
Stephen Timms
Q 163 I think the Government’s argument would be that if you want to measure the life chances of children, you are better looking at measures of worklessness and educational attainment at key stage 4 instead of the poverty indicators in the Child Poverty Act. If you want to get to life chances, do you think that that is the right approach?
Matt Padley: I do not see why it needs to be either/or—I think both in combination. What looking at educational achievement at the end of key stage 4 will tell you or what looking at the proportion of children who have grown up in workless households will tell you is useful information, but still there is so much evidence to suggest that children growing up in low-income households have poorer outcomes that measuring the incidence of low income remains important. I am not saying don’t measure worklessness or educational attainment at the end of key stage 4; I am saying, don’t wholesale abandon income measures, just because of the recent broader economic climate that has meant that relative income measures are showing some very perverse results.
Alison Garnham: What I would like to say is that the basket of measures that we currently have is an attempt to operationalise a definition of child poverty. The most well known one that we have is the one that Peter Townsend came up with back in the 1970s. He said:
“Individuals...in the population can be said to be in poverty when they lack resources to obtain the...diet, participate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or...widely encouraged and approved, in the societies in which they belong.”
No indicator is perfect, which is why, in order to try and triangulate this problem, there are about five measures in the Child Poverty Act. Some of them relate to low income and some relate to deprivation—things you cannot afford because you lack resources. Some of them relate to the persistence of poverty. If all of those go, we do not know what we are tracking these other life chance events against. If you were to add all those life chance measures to the core set of indicators in the Child Poverty Act, that would be a good thing. In fact, we have always said, why not add more indicators? That is a perfectly sensible thing to do.
The problem with what has been proposed is that by taking away all the income measures, you are no longer really measuring child poverty; you are measuring something else. Also, you are completely missing out on one of the main causes of child poverty today, which is low-paid work. Two thirds of poor children live with working parents, so if all you measure is worklessness and educational attainment, you are completely sweeping aside that group.
Stephen Timms
Q 164 The other question is: do you think there should be a Government target around child poverty?
Alison Garnham: Yes, I do. It keeps the Government honest. I think it is really important. In fact, in 2010 there was a cross-party consensus that we needed to tackle and drive down child poverty, so it is very disappointing that we are now arriving at a point where we are not even going to track it any more. It should continue to be tracked, and there need to be targets, because in that way there is something to aim at. Child poverty was reduced by 1.1 million between the baseline year of 1998 and 2010, so we were on course. We were halfway towards the target of elimination, which was 10%, even though we were not halfway to zero, which was the target the Government had set itself. So we were actually doing rather well. The problem now is that policies are driving us away from reducing child poverty, rather than that the target should go.
Dr Callan: The problem with having income targets is that they will always drive effort towards tackling symptoms and not causes of child poverty, so I would be much more in favour of a more rounded set of measures. Currently, we have only got measures to tackle what we would call two of the five pathways to poverty: poor educational attainment in children and parents, and worklessness. We know that family breakdown drives poverty. We know that serious personal debt and addictions, including gambling addictions, drive poverty, so I think we need more measures. The only thing I would say about income is simply that we need to be measuring the numbers of children who live in households where parents are not earning a living wage, or where parents have not earned a living wage for the last two years. Again, that puts the focus on earnings.
My understanding of the Government’s welfare reforms is that they have a very dynamic approach, which is what the CSJ asked for in 2009, that will help drive people into behaviour that will mean they increase their income through earnings. In international development, our approach for a very long time has been to not just give people money, but to give them the tools to increase their own life chances.
The Chair
Professor Gordon, have you picked up on what the questions are?
Professor Gordon: I think I have.
The Chair
I thought you might have done. Your answers, please.
Professor Gordon: There has been 400 years of research into the measurement of poverty in general, and child poverty in particular. The UK is arguably one of the world’s leading experts in these kinds of measures, which have been developed and have, over the years, spread across the world. They have been adopted by the European Union, by the OECD, and even by the World Bank. So we have a lot of expertise in the measurement of child poverty. The targets are very useful in terms of seeing whether resources are being allocated efficiently and effectively, and in seeing if the policies are working. So targets can be useful from that point of view.
The low income measures were originally introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s Government. The measures proposed in this Bill were originally introduced by the last Labour Government, although they were abandoned in 2007. They are all good measures, but the worklessness and education measures are not direct measures of child poverty. Child poverty is important because it is very expensive; it is not cost-neutral. Conservative econometric models have shown that the long-term consequences of child poverty cost about £25 billion, about 2% of GDP. Eradicating child poverty would be a boost to the economy and would, of course, create a much better society and much better life chances for children.
As I say, the measures of worklessness have been used before. They are part of a package of measures to which I have no objection. I support them and I always have, but they are not very specific measures of child poverty. Approximately two thirds of children in workless households are not poor: they do not live on a low income and the worklessness is temporary.
Stephen Timms
Q 165 I have one more question. You may not all be in a position to comment, but I would be interested to hear any of your opinions. One element of the Child Poverty Act was the requirement on local authorities to work with others in their area to develop a child poverty strategy for that area. There is no similar proposal in the Bill—for example, there is no requirement for a life chances strategy. In practice, were those strategies useful? Or do you think that the fact we are not going to have them in future is not a problem?
Alison Garnham: I think they were incredibly useful. They drove a lot of action and activity locally. Many local authorities set up their own local child poverty commissions and worked out what they could do to address child poverty. One of the biggest losses in losing the Child Poverty Act is that there will no longer be anything driving action at a local level. It would be a big improvement if something like that was introduced into the Bill to require local authorities to have local child poverty or life chances strategies.
Stephen Timms
Q 166 Can you give us any examples of where particularly good work was done in developing a strategy?
Alison Garnham: There were a number of local authorities, such as Leicester, Birmingham, Milton Keynes and so on. They tended to take on different characteristics in different areas. For example, in Liverpool they focused on early years strategies to improve early childhood education and care. In other areas they looked at things such as how they could manage their own benefits authority for discretionary housing payments and ameliorations of the council tax benefit scheme. In other areas, they looked at other kinds of projects and services. There was a wide variety of activity, which was very positive.
Dr Callan: Again, if we had something in the Bill that recognised that, alongside work and education, family breakdown—or boosting family stability, if you want to put it more positively—is such an important area for Government activity, then local authorities would have a lot more to get their teeth into at a local level. The use of children’s centre stock is very important. The opportunity would be created for children’s centres to do far more around a whole-family package of support, which is something the Prime Minister has talked about. The Bill could help to put some teeth on to that.
Stephen Timms
Q 167 Are you suggesting that there ought to be a requirement for local strategies to be in place, albeit perhaps that they would look rather different from the ones we have had in the past?
Dr Callan: Local strategies around life chances. As I say, if it is just education and worklessness, there are not necessarily enough levers at a local level to get local authorities working together more than they are already. Obviously a lot of local authorities already work very closely with the whole school estate in their areas, going right up to further education and universities.
I do not think that family support is a niche issue. It should be universal, in the same way that we have universal health and universal education. That is why it has to be in the Bill. I do not think it is beyond the wit of well intentioned people to come up with a measure for family stability, which would really strengthen the Bill.
The Chair
Eight colleagues have caught my eye, so we will have concise questions and concise answers, please, although it is all good stuff.
The Chair
We now welcome colleagues from the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Will you kindly read yourselves into the record, so that we know who you are for Hansard? Then Mr Stephen Timms will ask a series of questions.
Julia Unwin: I am Julia Unwin, chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Dr Niemietz: I am Kristian Niemietz, head of health and welfare at the Institute of Economic Affairs.
Stephen Timms
Q 194 First of all, may I ask you both whether you think that the Government ought to have some target on child poverty, or whether that is not an appropriate thing for the Government to have?
Julia Unwin: I run an evidence-based organisation. I find it very hard to understand how you can receive evidence, measure things and then not establish some sort of target. Across government, we have stretch targets for a whole range of issues. Given the importance of this for our growing economy, I do not understand how the Government can receive the information without having at least a stretch target in mind.
Dr Niemietz: I think there should be a target. There is a problem if you use a bundle of measures that can move in opposite directions. That undermines the idea of using a target to strengthen accountability. With the four measures that we had, that did happen for a while—one indicator showed that poverty was rising, another showed that poverty was falling, and another showed that poverty was flatlining. So I think there should be a single measure and a single target, and that should be a sensible one, maybe close to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s minimum income standard. You can debate the technicalities—how exactly this basket is assembled—but a target can be built around a measure that reflects the living standards of people on low incomes .
Stephen Timms
Q 195 Can you develop that idea a little bit further? The thinking in the Child Poverty Act was that you had four different indicators. As you say, sometimes they move in different directions, but that means that you end up with a rounded understanding of what is going on. You are suggesting that one could devise a single figure that told you everything you needed. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you think that should look?
Dr Niemietz: Well, I wrote a paper a while ago in which the poverty line was based on the poverty and social exclusion survey. People were asked to identify what they thought were the necessities of life in a modern developed country, and it turned out there was a fairly stable consensus on that. If you convert that list into a consumption basket, and collect the prices of those goods at a regional level, then you have a poverty line that reflects a consensual understanding of what poverty means. You can still use complementary measures—say plus or minus a few items for sensitivity analysis—but you have one central measure that is internally consistent, and you do not get these contradictions.
If you use a bundle of measures, and if they can give you contradictory information, you have to have a way of trading them off against each other. It would not be a problem if you could say, “I don’t mind an increase in relative poverty as long as it is accompanied by an x% reduction in absolute poverty, or something else”, but we did not have that kind of trade-off with the four measures that were previously used.
Julia Unwin: I am very pleased to hear Kristian talk about the minimum income standard, on which we have done some joint work in the past. I would still argue for a number of different measures, because of the complexity of what we are dealing with; and I think in our modern, more complicated, world we are dealing with poverty that looks rather different from the way it looked in the past. Clearly the disposable income of any household is a very important measure, and how we understand that and determine what that is matters; but so, too, do the other measures, and I believe that the old income measure mattered alongside the others. The fact that they are contradictory, I think, does not give you a binary response; it amplifies what the Government need to do, because the tools are not all with Government. They are with local authorities; they are within the market; they are with employers, and actually we need a public discourse about that. That is what a complex target allowed us to have.
Stephen Timms
Q 196 May I ask one more question? This is really to Julia. In your written evidence to us you have commented on and welcomed both the full employment report that is proposed in the Bill and the apprenticeships reporting obligation; but you have argued for some more detailed information to be provided. Could you just tell us a little bit about what you think should be in those reports?
Julia Unwin: I think we have to understand that the world of employment has changed in the last decade. Since the global financial crisis, employment at the bottom end of the labour market, which is what we are talking about, is more precarious than it was when some of the legislation was drafted in previous decades. People are in and out of work and rarely out of poverty, and our indicators are that four out of five people who get into work are still in low-paid work 10 years on. There is very little progression; so an employment report needs to look at progression, certainty, security. Those are the measures that really matter when you are looking at the nature of employment. It is no longer simply a good thing in itself to be in work, although that may be right for all sorts of other reasons.
Stephen Timms
Q 197 You had some comments, I think, about what the apprenticeships report should tell us. Could you say a few words about that?
Julia Unwin: Apprenticeships clearly matter. We can learn from other countries about how to do them so much better, but we need to understand in fairly fine-grained detail the impact of apprenticeships and what they do for people’s life chances, as opposed to thinking that they are a process through which people go and that there are automatically positive outcomes.
Peter Heaton-Jones
Q 198 I want to move on to discuss clauses 9 and 10, which put in place measures to freeze certain elements of benefits and tax credits over a four-year period. I am keen to get your knowledge and experience on how, since roughly 2008, average earnings have risen by about 11% while average benefits have risen by—depending slightly on how it is measured; I agree that there is a grey area—about 21%. Do you think that the measures in the Bill to freeze certain elements are welcome in that they would get a bit of equalisation in the system? We should bear in mind the Government’s stated intention that they are trying to bring more people closer to work, and to make work pay—to use the slogan.
Dr Niemietz: The problem with an across-the-board freeze is that you do not really incentivise work, because you freeze out-of-work incomes and also in-work incomes, or at least that part of the transfer that is supposed to top up low incomes and thereby incentivise people to enter the workforce. If you freeze both, you lose that effect because the gap remains the same. It would have made more sense to freeze only out-of-work benefits, or even to uprate them at a rate below inflation, but not to touch the work-related top-ups, especially the 30-hours element of working tax credit, which was meant to give people an incentive not only to move into some work but, once they were in work, to move further—to move from minor employment towards something closer to full-time employment.
Julia Unwin: The benefits freeze is a huge risk for the Government to be taking, and to have taken in advance in this way. The basket of goods on which poorer households spend their income has been subject to more inflation than the rest because the cost of essentials has gone up. We are currently in a period of lower inflation, but we cannot predict what will happen. I would recommend, as we did in our submission, that the Government review the rate of inflation annually. The outcome might well be a freeze, but actually, what the Government are doing is removing the one buffer that the poorest households, both in and out of work, have against inflation. That is hugely risky.
Assisted Dying (No. 2) Bill
Stephen Timms Excerpts(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Rob Marris
I want good quality, widely available palliative care and I want people to have the choice, but I do not think the House should be holding terminally ill people hostage until we get good palliative care. The availability and funding of palliative care are not in my hands.
Rob Marris
No, I must make some progress. I am sorry.
The European Association of Palliative Care says there is no correlation between the quantity and quality of palliative care in any jurisdiction and whether or not that jurisdiction has legislation like or similar to the Bill. The legislation I am proposing today, as many Members will know, is broadly based on the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, which came into effect in 1997. It has been in operation for 18 years. My Bill has the additional safeguard of judicial oversight.
When the Act was passed in 1994, the Oregon Hospice Association was strongly opposed to it. It has reversed its position, and it now recognises—in my view correctly, although I am not an expert—that assisted dying is one of the choices that ought to be available to dying people. In Oregon, 90% of people who have an assisted death—0.25% of those who die each year—are enrolled in hospice care, and Oregon is ranked among the best states in the United States of America for palliative care provision.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Second sitting)
Stephen Timms Excerpts(8 years, 8 months ago)
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The Chair
Thank you. We have a good hour for this session, so we have quite a lot of time, but there are four of you. I ask for concise and fairly loud answers, but do not feel that you all have to answer every question unless it is specifically your bag or you have something to say. We will start with a number of questions from Stephen Timms.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
Q 17 I have three questions to ask at the beginning. I think the first one is mainly to Octavia. We heard this morning from Women Like Us that the agreed flexibilities in the conditionality around lone parents at the jobcentre are being withdrawn. What is the experience of people who have been in touch with Gingerbread about the application of the lone parent flexibilities? I do not think that there has been any change of policy. Are there things that could be done to ensure that lone parents can benefit from the flexibilities that they should benefit from?
Octavia Holland: The feedback that we have had through our advice line and through our membership body, which is now some 60,000 single parents, is that there is huge variability in how the lone parent flexibilities are applied. To put that in context, the lone parent flexibilities were traditionally in secondary legislation—in regulations. With universal credit, they are being taken out of secondary legislation and put into guidance. The feedback from single parents is that they have felt pressure to take jobs at hours that do not fit with their caring responsibilities, such as night shifts at the weekends or working in the evenings, and that sufficient consideration has not been given to the childcare that is available or to the type of jobs that they might be able to take. We are having an ongoing discussion with officials at the Department for Work and Pensions about this but it is difficult to get any clarity about the steps that are being taken to ensure that the flexibilities are applied consistently.
That presents a particular concern about the proposals around conditionality. Without those lone parent flexibilities, single parents, with three and four-year-olds, who are required to work, have fewer safeguards to be able to say, “It is not reasonable for me to work at the weekend because there is not any childcare at the weekend.” Our feedback through the advice line is definitely that it is a growing concern; that the flexibilities are not being applied consistently.
The other thing I would add quickly is that there are now far fewer lone parent advisers than previously. There are some left but the trend is that work coaches should have expertise in lone-parent issues. The feedback we have had is that that is contributing to the issues. Obviously, single parents have a number of factors that need to be considered. When you had lone parent advisers, the evidence was that they were really helping to get single parents into sustainable employment. That expertise does now seem to be lacking. That is certainly a concern.
Stephen Timms
Q 18 To clarify, in your discussions with Department for Work and Pensions officials, there is still the intention that those flexibilities will be available but your experience, in practice, is that they are quite often not?
Octavia Holland: Yes, absolutely. To clarify, it is even quite difficult to establish where in guidance those lone parent flexibilities are now. They are in disparate pieces of guidance that are given to jobcentres and work coaches. It is not like you can get your hands on one piece of guidance that says, “Look, if you want to support a single parent into a decent job, these are the kind of things you want to consider.” There is a real lack of clear information.
Hannah Bardell
Q 19 Thank you very much for coming to speak to us. On that point about lone parent flexibilities, do you not believe that those important flexibilities should therefore be brought into statute, so that they are very clear and people can understand them?
Octavia Holland: At Gingerbread, we absolutely feel that the lone parent flexibilities should be in regulations, as they were previously, because that makes it very clear to jobcentres and work coaches the best way they can support single parents into employment. Single parents are generally very keen to work and over 60% of them do, but you do need to consider the fact that they are not going to have childcare in the evenings or the weekends. You do need to think about that kind of thing. Yes, we do support that they should be back in regulations.
Stephen Timms
Q 20 This is a question mainly for Tony. We are told that there is evidence that the benefit cap has encouraged some people to go into work who would not otherwise have done so. Can you tell us how compelling you think that evidence is, and how big an effect there appears to have been from the application of the benefit cap?
Tony Wilson: The Department published some ad hoc analysis about a year ago on the estimated impacts of the benefit cap. That was peer-reviewed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. That was a good piece of work and it did show a statistically significant positive impact on some people in households affected by the benefit cap, on the likelihood of their moving off benefit and in to work. It showed some interesting things. It showed that those impacts were greater where the financial impact of the cap was greater. They were greater in London than in other parts of the country, so things you would intuitively expect to see.
However, there are a couple of points. One is that the total numbers moving into work are very low. This is a group where the likelihood of entering work, where you have been capped, is very low. A percentage increase in the likelihood of moving into work, you might see a 30% or 40% increase in likelihood of entering work. But if your likelihood was originally one in 20, then that might increase to only about one in 15 and still look like a very large impact. The research found percentage points. If you like, the absolute impact of the cap on the likelihood of entering work was pretty small—it was three or four percentage points. In other words, out of every 100 people capped, an additional three or four may move into work. That was the average. It was greater where the financial impacts were greater, which is what one would expect.
The benefit cap is probably one of the only measures in the last Parliament that created a really strong financial incentive to move into work. Out of all the welfare reform measures, if you move into work, you get your benefit back, essentially. You get your £200 or £300 income back. To some extent, it might be surprising that there was not a greater impact. The impact in terms of actual numbers was relatively small.
More interesting still, we evaluated a programme called the Brent Navigator. Brent Council invested in adviser support to help capped households back into work. We used a statistical technique to try to find the additional impact of that, and we estimated that that had about a 50% positive impact. Having intensive, adviser-led support to help people move back into work led to a larger-again impact on the likelihood of people moving into work. It highlights the importance of joining up the support you deliver and ensuring that those who are affected by reforms also get access to appropriate support to move back into work.
With the lowering of the cap, there will be more people with quite small losses compared with what happened under the previous cap. In those groups with small losses, the evidence found a far smaller impact. It was a negligible—pretty much a zero—impact on people whose losses were £10, £20 or £30 a week. That is consistent with the impacts of many of the other reforms such as the spare room subsidy, or the bedroom tax, or the lower uprating of benefit, which add quite small impacts and probably did not have a behaviour effect.
The Chair
I wonder whether the other witnesses would like to comment on that question as well. Is there any evidence out there in your world about what has happened in relation to the benefit cap?
Kirsty McHugh: Not dissimilar to Tony in many ways. In terms of our members, obviously the work incentives are increased. The differential between being out of work and in work has increased. That has come through in some of the anecdotal evidence from the provider base. At the moment, it is anecdotal. I do not think we have hard figures that could be shared. Many providers are investing more and more in the off-benefit calculators. They are being very clear with individuals what their options are and how much better it is going to be for them to move into the workplace. Generally, we find that it is about other barriers stopping people going into work, which is more around skills and health and so on, so concentrating on those is the way to make the bigger uplift.
Stephen Timms
Q 21 A final question from me to Kirsty. The note we had from the Clerks tells us that the proportion of Work programme participants who have secured sustainable job outcomes has been almost 25% for people on jobseeker’s allowance, but less than 10% for people on employment and support allowance. Looking back on the experience of the Work programme, why do you think performance has been so poor for that particular group? What are the lessons for the future design of the Work programme to try to do a better job next time round?
Kirsty McHugh: The first thing to bear in mind is that the majority of people on ESA who are put into the Work programme have not received any support before at all. The targets put in place were best guesses by the officials, based on a far better economic scenario than we had at the beginning of the Work programme. Performance has been improving in relation to ESA. In fact, all targets have been met across all the providers—it is quite difficult to say bad performance or good performance, because we did not actually know what to expect in relation to performance. We need to do things differently next time in relation to people on employment and support allowance. We know that, once they get into work, they stick in work. We have far more information about their distance from the labour market, so there is some real learning about how we put in place a financial model that means we are able to invest more up front and perhaps less in the sustained employment element, because ESA people do stick in employment once they are there.
The Chair
Charlotte, do you want to come in on that point?
Charlotte Pickles: The only thing I would add is that there is a common perception that the Work programme is failing ESA claimants, which I think is a little unfair. In its last report, the National Audit Office said it was broadly in line with previous programmes. One of the challenges, which Kirsty touched on, is that we really do not know very well what works for these cohorts. I think it is less about saying the Work programme has not worked. Broadly, it has, as Kirsty has said, met expectations. We need to be investing, looking at and experimenting in what will actually help quite a diverse group of people.
Stephen Timms
Q 22 One of the interesting things about this discussion in the context of the Bill is the Government’s objective to halve the disability employment gap. Is it not clear that we would have to do much better than the 10% that has come out of the Work programme if we were to get anywhere close to halving that gap?
Kirsty McHugh: It is a hugely positive move from the Government to say that they want to do that. It is hugely ambitious. At the moment that means an additional 1.1 million people with disabilities into work. That means looking at the assessment regime, the interaction of the assessment regime with the employment support regime and the finances. It also means looking at the demand side from employers. There is some interesting work going on with the behavioural insights unit and others about how we actually change the mindset and de-risk it, potentially, in their minds—it should not be risky but sometimes it is perceived as being so—so that they are more likely to take on people with disabilities. It is not just one thing, but a whole series of things. It is a huge cultural shift but I am very pleased that the Government have said that they want to do it.
The Minister for Employment (Priti Patel)
Q 23 Kirsty, you have touched on a broad range of themes, in particular on the Work programme and ESA. I know from discussions within the Department and, you will be aware, with Work programme providers, that this is a challenging area but one that we are ambitious about. Do you have any learnings or thoughts from the providers that your organisation represents? For ESA claimants in particular, what are those game-changing interventions? What else do you think the Government could focus on in terms of spending for support—bringing people closer to the labour market but, importantly, helping them to continue their journey of long-term sustained employment, not just getting them into work? What kind of health interventions could we look into? Do you have any insight or experience of seeing fruitful outcomes?
Kirsty McHugh: We did a piece of work for the Department bringing together a range of our members looking at ESA. We have actually done that more than once over the course of the past few years, as you can imagine. We have a lot of the big disability charities in membership—last year it was two-thirds not-for-profit—but we also have all the Work programme primes and Work Choice primes. A lot of the best practice comes from the other programmes, not just the Work programme.
The big thing is staff skills and confidence. For somebody who is presenting to them, it is them knowing about that right mix of support and challenge as a front-line adviser. They may have been out of work for 11 or 12 years so their confidence is on the floor. They have a huge gap in their CV and the mindset is not there in terms of, “I want to work and I can work.” Often, the providers say that once you switch that mindset it is almost job done.
How do you get to that attitudinal change so that people feel really positive about themselves and want to change their lives and those of their families and communities? It takes a while. It is about one-to-one relationships with front-line staff—none of this is rocket science. It is about long-term relationships and trust. Therefore, lower case load is really important for people with disability and health conditions. There has been a lot of investment in cognitive behavioural therapy-type approaches and talking support. Group therapy seems to work very well. There is never one magic bullet. A lot of this will be quite familiar to you. The good adviser will have a personalised referral to a range of different services in that area but staff skills are more important than anything else.
It is then about selling in—a horrible term—that individual to an employer. If somebody has a big gap in their work history, that can be quite an ask of an employer. Therefore, getting them work experience, or something that fills the hole in the CV that proves to them and to the employer that maybe they are a bit less of a risk, is really important. We know a lot now about the prevalence of mental health difficulties, which often co-exist with other physical conditions. It is often not just one condition. Often, the barrier to work is not health but the fact that they have got a lack of work history and a lack of skills.
I think there is a good consensus between the officials and the sector about what has worked and what has not worked and what we want to do going forward. As I said, there is quite a lot of evidence that the sustainment rates for people on ESA who get into work are high. What we definitely need to do is bring more money up front, which then means the specialist providers, charities and so on can do more up front with that individual and maybe we will have less on sustainment payments than we have currently. It is not about increasing the overall unit cost but about remodelling it.
The Chair
Let us have an answer from everybody, and this will be our final flourish.
Sophie Corlett: It is hugely important and much underused in mental health, and it could be much more widely understood as being really useful, particularly if people are able to use it before they apply for a job so that they can take a package with them. That would be the ideal, really, so that they could go to an interview and say, “This is what I can bring with me.” That would be the best use of it.
Matt Oakley: I will defer to delivery colleagues.
Gareth Parry: It is a fantastic programme. I would massively advocate mental health support services, because we deliver one. It is a great programme, which is significantly underused, at creating awareness and promoting not only mental health service support but all of Access to Work. It remains a challenge, but overall it is a fantastic programme. I should declare that I already gave evidence at the Select Committee last year, and I do not want to repeat any of that evidence.
Looking forward, it is probably the one area in the employment arena where personalisation could be looked at to a much greater degree. It is as close as we have got in the employment agenda to personalised budgets. It is not personalised budgets—it is not personalisation as we know it today—but it could be, and it could be a really interesting arena just to take the next step towards giving more choice and control over people’s employment journeys.
Stephen Timms
Q 86 Can you give us an example of the use of Access to Work for people with mental health problems? What are the kinds of things that you are able to do to help?
Gareth Parry: A whole range of things. I am just wondering, in the interests of brevity, whether that is something that I should do outside this meeting. We can send you a whole load of case studies and examples of what we did.
The Chair
If you could write to the Committee, that would be great.
Laura Cockram: Personally, we have some examples of where it has been really useful, but it is not something that is widespread in terms of people with Parkinson’s. It has been positive where we have heard about it.
Roy O'Shaughnessy: I have heard of many positive experiences. It is underutilised by individuals who could make use of it, and it is virtually unknown by the employers. Matching those two things up is important.
Oral Answers to Questions
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The Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims (Mike Penning)
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the work that he has done in that area. As a former Transport Minister, I have looked at this issue for many years. I will continue to look at the review and we will come forward with proposals. We are determined that whatever proposals come forward will be fit for purpose. His work will be very helpful.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
The international child abduction charity, Reunite, reports that the wrongful overseas retention of children is up by 30% so far this year. We need urgent action to implement the welcome recent recommendation from the Law Commission that wrongful retention should be made a criminal offence. Will the Minister say when the Government will respond to that recommendation, and can he give a date by which we can expect to see the legislation that is needed?
Simon Hughes
Kidnap and child abduction can have devastating effects on victims and their families. It is vital that the law reflects the gravity of the offences, and that those who commit them are punished accordingly. I pay tribute to the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues who formed a group in this House to argue for a change in the law. In the past, people could be punished for taking their children out of the country, but not for keeping them illegally out of the country rather than bringing them home. The coalition Government asked the Law Commission to consider the issue. It has reported back and recommended a change to the Child Abduction Act 1984. We are looking at that recommendation actively and I hope that we will be able to make progress in this Parliament.
Immigration Statistics
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Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
Did Ministers ever really believe their net migration target?
Oral Answers to Questions
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Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
3. What his future plans for legal aid are.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Shailesh Vara)
We are implementing the reforms of litigation procurement and Crown court advocacy fees that we announced last month. Although making fee reductions is unavoidable, we have listened to the professions wherever we can and taken concrete steps to ease the impact of the changes. Moreover, the Justice Secretary has given a personal commitment that this Government will not seek further savings from criminal legal aid.
The Ministry of Justice and the Legal Aid Agency keep the operation of both the criminal and civil legal aid schemes under continual review. The Government plan to undertake a post-implementation review of the legal aid provisions within the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 within three to five years of implementation. That review will include an assessment of the impact of the reforms implemented during that period.
Stephen Timms
The cost of legal aid came in at £56 million less than was budgeted last year, and research commissioned by the Law Society from Oxford Economics argues that falling crime will reduce the legal aid bill by £80 million by 2018-19. What assessment has the Minister made of the argument that the spending cuts will be delivered without the scale of service reductions he is currently proposing?
Mr Vara
We need to look at the bigger picture and recognise that legal aid expenditure in this country—for England and Wales—is some £2 billion, which makes our system one of the most expensive in the world. Even after the reductions have gone through, the bill will still be one of the most generous in the world. We have to ensure that these reductions go through so that the legal aid budget remains sustainable.
Oral Answers to Questions
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Maria Miller
There is an enormous amount of evidence of the economic advantages in not just rural areas but across the country of faster broadband, and that is why the Government are putting in place a programme that will see more than £1 billion-worth of investment going into this vital infrastructure.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
11. The National Audit Office has exposed lamentable failings in the rural broadband programme, including the absence of competitive provision, which we have discussed in the Chamber. Its report tells us that BT is to be handed £1.2 billion for this project, but, for example,“The Department does not know how much contingency BT has included.”Will the Secretary of State insist that BT provide full 20:20 cost-transference before public money is handed over?
Maria Miller
The right hon. Gentleman should also acknowledge that the NAO report stated that the value-for-money controls in contracts appeared to be robust. We all know that BT will be paid only on the basis of actual eligible costs incurred. I hope he will join me in celebrating a programme that will deliver such an important piece of infrastructure to communities up and down the country.
Mr Vaizey
I thank my hon. Friend for that question. It is important to stress that local authorities are in the driving seat in broadband roll-out. Whether to share roll-out plans is a decision for them and some are keen to manage demand. The Secretary of State has written to all local authorities and urged them to share their roll-out plans with their communities, precisely so that community broadband providers have the opportunity to plug the gaps.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
The National Audit Office has told us that the rural broadband programme is already running 22 months late. It also states that
“the Department does not have strong assurance over the appropriateness of the levels of contingency”.
May I press the Minister again to ensure that adequate cost data are provided by BT before money is handed over, not least so that there is a fair opportunity for community initiatives such as the one we heard about a few minutes ago?
Mr Vaizey
First, it is important to stress that the broadband programme is going extremely well. As I have said before, we should reach 88% coverage by the end of 2015 and 90% in early 2016. That is far ahead of Labour’s plan, which was only to get to superfast broadband by the end of 2017. It is also important to stress that the NAO acknowledged that the in-life controls in local authority contracts with BT were robust. We follow exactly the same procedure as that used in Cornwall, where BT has gone from 80% to 95% coverage for the same amount of money, and we have robust cost controls.
Oral Answers to Questions
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Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
12. What her policy is on competition in the telecommunications market.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr Edward Vaizey)
Our telecoms market is one of the most open and competitive in the world. Effective deregulation has set industry free to create new services and set international standards. Of course, the way we configured the 4G auction ensured that we remained a full-player marketplace in mobile.
Stephen Timms
The mobile operator 3 has a licence because the previous Government wanted competition. The Secretary of State and I were recently at a celebration of 3’s 10th anniversary. That competition has hugely benefited customers, so why has the entire rural superfast broadband fund been handed to one company—to BT? BT is now behaving like any monopolist that has everyone over a barrel, and we have heard about the consequences from all sides this morning. Why has competition been forgotten?
Mr Vaizey
Competition has not been forgotten. May I say that I bow to no one in my respect for the right hon. Gentleman as a former telecoms Minister who did so much to promote competition. As a result of that, BT has just a 30% share of the broadband market, and the market share of the historic incumbent in the copper broadband market is one of the lowest in the world. That is a testament to the right hon. Gentleman’s great work, but we are carrying it on. We made sure that our process for rural broadband was competitive. It just so happens that BT has won the contracts, and I reject the suggestion that it is behaving like a monopolist. We are getting value for money for our contracts, and BT is a great British company doing a great job for Britain.
Oral Answers to Questions
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Mr Vaizey
Our ambition is to get 90% of premises connected to superfast broadband, but to get all premises connected to broadband speeds of 2 megabits per second. There should be a broadband service for almost all households and that will be technologically neutral, so it should be the right technology solution for them.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
The Government were wrong to drop the previous Government’s commitment to deliver a universal broadband service of 2 megabits per second by last year. Has the Minister seen this week’s report by Policy Exchange, which re-emphasises the importance of finally delivering the universal availability of broadband of 2 megabits per second, particularly in rural areas, where businesses are so dependent on it?
Mr Vaizey
The right hon. Gentleman is a distinguished former telecoms Minister, so I take what he says very seriously. I was at the launch of the Policy Exchange pamphlet, but I do not agree with him. I think that it is right that we have a superfast broadband commitment of 90% by 2015, which is realistic and achievable.
Church of England (Women Bishops)
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Guy Opperman
I am happy to take that guidance and clarification, because some people will have interpreted some of our debates and the questions that have been asked over the past month or so as giving the impression that we wish to get involved, rather than allowing the Church itself to make those decisions. I endorse entirely my hon. Friend’s point that the Church has bravely taken the step to expedite matters as fast as possible. Tomorrow, some of us will meet Bishop Justin Welby, who I understand is anxious to resolve the matter as quickly and efficaciously as possible.
It is right that we discuss this issue. We should take this opportunity to celebrate the role of women in the Church. It is patently obvious in my constituency that their presence has transformed the Church and improved it immeasurably. The Church is much more open and is much enlivened by the presence of females leading the congregation. That can only be a good thing.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
I broadly agree with the hon. Gentleman’s argument that it would be better if the Church resolved this matter itself, but does he not accept that there will be limitations on that, given, for example, that there is currently a bloc of Members in the other place, all of whom happen to be men? There is a limit to how long that can continue.
Guy Opperman
I would go further. I see it as the natural progression from this debate that there will be women bishops, that there will be women bishops in the other place and, ultimately, that there is the potential for women archbishops, although I have no doubt that that will not happen speedily. I endorse what the right hon. Gentleman says and he moves me on to my next point, which is that there cannot be partial equality. Eventually, equality must be total. In that respect, what goes on in the other place must follow what is taking place in this debate.
As one of my female priests put it to me, the Church is not actually about the House of Laity, but about the work that it does locally in its parishes. That is the most important part of its work. In my constituency and across Northumberland, I am certain that it is providing a fantastic service. Although I may have been a lapsed sinner in respect of the vices of horse racing, bookmaking and being a poor jockey, I am happy to now be in the right place.