Scotland Bill

Wayne David Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green]

I am pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to this debate. It seems to me that the Secretary of State, when he responds, needs to be very precise about his objection to the amendments that have been tabled in relation to a number of key principles. He will first need to be explicit about whether he believes the proposals to be at odds with, and moving in the opposite direction from, the intention of Smith. I think that a number of the amendments would give better effect to Smith than would the Bill as currently drafted. Therefore, the argument is not about whether we share the same intention, but about whether the legislation is adequate for the task. I hope that he will bear that in mind when responding.

The second thing that some of the amendments that I and my hon. Friends have tabled seek to achieve, as indeed do some of the SNP amendments, is to simplify the legislation. It is a little too complicated and hedged about with who is in and who is out of the provision of certain exceptions, for example in relation to definitions of disability, or too narrow in relation to definitions of carers. I hope that the Secretary of State will be able to explain precisely what his objections are to the amendments that seek to make the legislation easier to give effect to, and plainer in, its intent.

The third thing, which I think is the substance of this debate, is to a degree a sideline debate. It is not specifically about the legislation; it is about our intentions for the welfare state. I think that the Secretary of State should acknowledge that we are talking about a welfare state that enables people. Where benefits enable people’s full social participation—for example, carers’ benefits and benefits that enable disabled people to live decent and independent lives—there is no case for decrying them on the basis that they create a dependency culture, because what they create is a culture of dignity and participation. I hope that he will be able to distinguish between the two.

Having said that, I do not think that there is a wish, certainly on the part of Labour Members, to say that there should not be a conditionality regime. Our party has always accepted that in a conditional system there must be a backstop of sanctions for people who wilfully refuse to comply. Of course, the vast majority do not wilfully refuse to comply; they get caught up in a completely baffling and increasingly unjust system. The hon. and learned Member for North East Hertfordshire (Sir Oliver Heald) has rightly accepted that that system now needs to be reviewed, because it is clearly well beyond what any reasonable conditionality and sanctions regime should look like. However, that is not really the purpose of this legislation or what this debate is about.

I want to make two or three specific points in support of some of the remarks that were made earlier. First, in relation to disability benefits, I think that the way clause 19 has been written will cause considerable confusion and dispute about who falls within the ambit of the benefits that the Scottish Government can create or top up. For example, does the fact that somebody needs to be suffering significant adverse effects and be unable to carry out day-to-day tasks exclude someone who suffers from double incontinence? Arguably, that person should be within the ambit of the legislation, but why do we need to have any doubt? Does “short-term” mean that someone suffering from a fatal illness that is likely to lead to fatality within three or four months will be within the ambit of the legislation? It seems to me that if we stuck to a much plainer description of disability benefits and of who is eligible, we would avoid a lot of unnecessary dispute and heartache, and we might enable the Scottish Parliament to prescribe much more simply that certain conditions or circumstances would automatically give rise to benefit entitlement, as is the case with the UK’s legislation.

[Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)]

On that point, my hon. Friend will know that patients who are terminally ill with less than six months to live are automatically entitled to disability living allowance or personal independence payment. The contrast between that specificity and the vagueness before us today is very stark.

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[Priti Patel]

I will not give way, because we are running out of time.

Members mentioned clause 23, on discretionary payments. I assure the Committee that the clause will not limit the Scottish Parliament’s existing competence and will not prevent the making of discretionary payments to people in families under exceptional pressure.

Finally, I turn to new clause 31, which would insert a new exception into the social security reservation in the Scotland Act 1998, giving the Scottish Parliament the power to create new benefits. As set out on Second Reading and in our discussions with the Scottish Government, the Government agree with the principle in the Smith commission agreement that the Scottish Parliament should be able to create new benefits.

[Wayne David]

Will the Minister give way?

[Priti Patel]

No. I have taken interventions and I want to make my point. Time is running out.

[Wayne David]

On a point of order, Mr Crausby. The Minister has repeatedly said that she cannot respond to the House because time is short. We have until 7 o’clock.

[Priti Patel]

For the record, let me say that we have other groups of amendments to discuss this afternoon. I will happily have that discussion and I will come on to some of those other points in later discussions. There is no excuse.

Perhaps I may continue. We believe that the Scottish Parliament can already create new benefits under either existing powers or those devolved by the Bill. The Smith commission was clear about which welfare powers were to be devolved to the Scottish Parliament, and the Bill delivers those powers in a way that allows that Parliament to replace the benefits and payments for which powers are being devolved.

On areas of devolved responsibility outside welfare, we believe that the Scottish Parliament has the powers to provide financial assistance to people in devolved areas—it currently does so in some areas already. We do not consider that the social security reservation prevents the Scottish Parliament from providing such financial assistance. The proposed new exception would give the Scottish Parliament competence to legislate to create new benefits in any area other than those where reserved powers existed on 28 May 2015—the date on which the Bill was introduced. That would flip the social security reservation on its head. As such, that would not provide a new power to create benefits in areas of devolved responsibility; rather, it would devolve further areas of responsibility to the Scottish Parliament, which is not what the Smith commission agreement called for.

Undermining the social security reservation in that way would simply limit the freedom of the UK Parliament when introducing new welfare benefits, or making changes to existing reserved benefits in the future. We will discuss many other clauses and groups of amendments this afternoon, and I will happily cover some of those points in those discussions. At this stage, however, I urge hon. Members to withdraw their amendments.

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[Dr Whiteford]

My hon. Friend makes a very pertinent point.

During the intervening months between the simple request and getting the permission we needed, some of our most disadvantaged citizens continued to accrue rent arrears or had to do without essentials in order to meet their liabilities. That is just one concrete example of how restrictions of this type currently act as a stalling mechanism and a barrier to progressive change, and they demonstrate why we need to get rid of the veto.

Other examples of things we could do with these provisions include the power to maintain direct payments of housing benefit to social landlords—something that I think is in everybody’s interests—and the power to ensure that under universal credit claimants can receive individual payments, which potentially benefits women and children and protects their interests. Then there is the power to equalise the earnings disregard between the first and second earners in a household. Again, given the persistent pay gap in Scotland between women and men, that measure could predominantly benefit up to 70,000 women by up to £1,200 a year. By contrast, if we leave the Bill unamended, we curtail the powers of the Scottish Parliament to enact policies that are overwhelmingly in the interests of our citizens and are supported by them. We risk seeing such measures batted off into the long grass.

We also store up trouble down the line. It is fair to say that the Secretary of State got himself in a richt kirn earlier this month on the “Scotland 2015” programme when he was asked directly about the veto. When the presenter put it to him that

“it could be used to block if there was a political will to do that because who would decide if the Secretary of State was unreasonably withholding consent?”,

the Secretary of State said:

“Well, I would hope that it would never come to that, but because it’s on the face of the legislation ultimately it might be the courts that would decide.”

I fear that the Secretary of State has let the cat out of the bag; I suspect he was a lot more candid than he intended to be. I think we can infer from that very revealing remark that he knows that, in practice, this Bill’s measures will act as a veto on the Scottish Parliament—pure and simple. I put it to the Committee that if the Scottish Parliament has to go to court to enforce the powers devolved in the Bill, it is not worth the paper it is written on.

[Wayne David]

Does the hon. Lady accept that there is a potential constitutional point, too, in that what is being suggested is, in effect, a breach of the Sewel convention, whereby power is given with one hand, but is possibly taken away with the other?

[Dr Whiteford]

That is an astute point. It shows that if we get ourselves into a muddle with the legislation and it is just a kirn, we are storing up trouble down the line. The legislation has to be future-proof as well as present-proof. We must prepare for every eventuality.

We can dance around the semantics of the current wording of the Bill all afternoon, but if Scottish Ministers have to obtain the agreement from UK Ministers on when their measures are to take effect, that is, in effect, handing the UK the ability to block or delay the implementation of policy, frustrating the legitimate democratic process and contravening both the letter and the spirit of the Smith agreement. If the Government have to go to court to enforce these measures, it should be obvious that they are less than adequate. If the Secretary of State still maintains there is no veto, I challenge him to accept amendments 118 and 119, which make that explicit and beyond all doubt.

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[Tommy Sheppard]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. It is because of the iniquity of the current system, and the prospect that is being held out of worse things to come, that we seek a change. We seek to be able to take control of our welfare system in Scotland and shape it so that it meets the aspirations of the people. The hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) said earlier that Scotland could perhaps be an example of what might happen in the rest of the United Kingdom, and I very much hope that will be the case.

[Wayne David]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on the tone of his contribution. It is important that he recognises that the problems that he is lucidly describing apply to many working-class people throughout the United Kingdom, including in my constituency. We hope that the new powers will do something to help people in Scotland, but I ask him to remember that people throughout the United Kingdom are affected.

[Tommy Sheppard]

I absolutely understand that. If we get a chance in the years ahead, while welfare remains the responsibility of the UK Parliament, to join the Labour party in voting to apply the measures that we will introduce in Scotland to the hon. Gentleman’s constituents, I will be happy to take the opportunity to do so.

I turn to the Secretary of State’s veto, which has been mentioned. I know he will deny that it is a veto, but everyone else who has looked at the provisions thinks it is a veto, including most third sector organisations in Scotland. It will allow the Secretary of State to object to regulations that the Scottish Parliament might introduce to improve the welfare system in Scotland. How can it be right that a power is devolved yet not devolved, and that the Secretary of State will retain authority to govern such decisions? In an earlier stage of the debates on the Bill, one Conservative Member said that we should all trust each other and that life would be an awful lot better. Could the Secretary of State not find it in his heart to trust the Scottish Government to make regulations? After all, there are fairly closely defined parameters for those regulations, so why on earth burden everyone with the requirement that the Scottish Government have to seek the Secretary of State’s consent? It is absolutely ridiculous.

If there is one way in which Secretary of State could indicate that he is listening to Scotland, it is by saying, “Fair enough—if the Scottish Government take a decision, we will let them get on with it, because we have transferred authority. We do not have to keep looking over their shoulder and checking their homework.” I hope that he will take that on board.

The crux of the whole argument is political authority. We are now halfway through the fourth day of debates on the Bill, and the Government and the Secretary of State have yet to suggest that they will make any substantive change to it. The Minister for Employment suggested earlier that the clauses we were discussing were in line with the spirit and substance of the Smith agreement, but it is strange that everyone else disagrees, including the Scottish Parliament’s devolution committee, on which the Conservative party is represented. That all-party group said that the clauses as drafted did not represent the spirit or substance of the Smith agreement. Something has got to give, unless we are going to rename the Secretary of State the governor-general and accept that we will not have government with the consent of the people in Scotland. I hope that he will listen to the people and accept some amendments.

When I quizzed the Secretary of State yesterday, he leapt to his feet and said that he was listening, and that he was in fact in conversation with the Scottish Government. He cited conversations with my colleague the Deputy First Minister, John Swinney. That caused John Swinney to write to the Secretary of State to say that he considers that his name had almost been taken in vain. He states:

“you cited our ‘productive discussion’…There will have to be clear movement by the UK Government, otherwise it is becoming harder to justify that description.”

Today the Secretary of State has the opportunity to make some minor concessions to show that he is willing to listen to the people who were elected in Scotland—I am not talking just about the 56 SNP MPs; I think we can safely say that 58 out 59 MPs from Scotland do not want the Secretary of State to have a veto over powers that this Parliament might devolve to the Scottish Government. I hope that he will reflect on that and give some ground in his concluding remarks to show that he is listening.