Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Will Quince and Stephanie Peacock

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise this issue, and to highlight the difference being made by the 89 community diagnostic centres that have already been rolled out and the importance of getting up to 160 centres as quickly as possible. He is right that such innovations, including CDCs, surgical hubs, telemedicine and, of course, using spare capacity in the private sector, are helping us to tackle the longest waits and reduce the covid backlogs, and I very much thank him for his support in that endeavour.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

There are almost 20,000 people on the waiting list for treatment at Barnsley Hospital, but at the beginning of this month, 98% of the hospital’s beds were occupied. How does the Government expect that hospital to solve the treatment backlog when it simply does not have the resources?

[Will Quince]

We are increasing capacity by introducing an additional 7,000 beds and the £500-million discharge fund. In addition to that, an extra £250 million was announced in January. Over and above that, alternative capacity is being created through the independent sector, we are engaging with patients on choice, and we are working with the most challenged trusts. Of course, I understand the impact that this has on patients, and we are working hard to address the backlog.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Will Quince and Stephanie Peacock

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

This is not my direct area of responsibility, but of course mental health does present challenges for A&Es and for hospitals more generally. We are investing an extra £2.3 billion every year in mental health, we have 16% more staff and we have an additional bursary to attract more nurses into mental health. But we do recognise the challenges, and the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield) is working hard to address them.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

3. What recent steps his Department has taken to reduce waiting times for neurological diagnosis and treatment.

Early Years Educators

Debate between Will Quince and Stephanie Peacock

Tuesday 25th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Will Quince]

North, I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (James Daly)—I should not have got that one wrong! I will address his point later.

A further 12% are childminders and assistants. The expertise of those educators is our greatest asset in ensuring that early years provision is of the highest quality. We must invest in the workforce, and that is exactly what the Government are doing. I will set out how in more detail later.

I now turn to some of the specific points made in the debate, before going on to some of the broader themes. My hon. Friend the Member for Winchester, in his constructive contribution, had a quote—

“we would be lost without these people. They are truly amazing”—

and I could not agree more. I have—from next week—a 10-year-old and a six-year-old. Recently, they have been through numerous childcare settings. I understand the importance of the settings and how vital they are not only to the parents, but to the children. They love—I use that word deliberately—the people who look after them in the day, those educators in the early years settings.

We have to address how the profession is viewed and valued—as educators and more than just childcare. My hon. Friend was absolutely right about that, and I will come on to it. He started and finished his speech with how early years staff are educators; early years is far more than just childcare. I totally agree, and I look forward to working with him and the APPG to see what more we can do in that area.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) talked about the work we do with the devolved Administrations. A huge amount of work goes on at the level of officials. I have to confess, I have not yet met my counterpart to discuss this issue, but I very much look forward to doing so.

The hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), who is not in her place but to whom I will respond none the less, raised the vital issue of speech and language. We have created the professional development programme and we have put a lot of emphasis on speech and language, because of its importance. We invested an extra £27 million, as part of the £180 million recovery programme. We also have the SEND review and, as part of that, it is vital that we have early identification and early intervention. It is important that that happens in early years settings wherever possible.

[Stephanie Peacock]

On the point about SEN provision, I have been contacted by a nursery in Barnsley which provides support—one-to-one support, in many cases—for children with SEN. It is worried that a number of nurseries are having to turn away children because there simply is not the funding. My local council has a deficit of £11 million, which is set to double in the coming years. What are the Government doing on SEN generally, and more specifically on funding?

[Will Quince]

The hon. Lady is right that there are significant issues within the SEND system, which is why we have the SEND review. There are local authorities with significant pressure on their budgets. We are putting more money into the high-needs budget—about 10%, year on year—but we are conscious that money alone will not solve the issue. That is why we have the SEND review. I am working at pace on that as we speak. The SEND review will conclude and we will launch a Green Paper and a consultation by the end of March, so within the first quarter of the year. The hon. Lady’s point is well made.

My hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory) mentioned people leaving the profession. I will come back to that point, because it is really important. Recruitment and retention are key. I hear her call about the pilots in Cornwall and I will certainly look into that; I am always keen to visit Cornwall, whenever possible, so I will bear that in mind.

My hon. Friend also mentioned a largely female workforce, which is something I want to address. I want to see more men working in early years settings. It is really important. As my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester referenced, the Government want families to stay together wherever possible. Where they do not, there is not necessarily a male role model in the household, so it is really important in education settings that there are good male role models for children to look up to. We have the Pulse survey, which monitors the private, voluntary and independent sector. We meet with the sector regularly to keep on top of these issues.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) mentioned ratios, which I will come on to very briefly. I assure him that local authorities can retain only 5% of the funding allocated; they have to pass the rest on. My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Andrew Lewer) referenced the whole-child approach, the first 1,001 days and family hubs. I recognise that he welcomes the £300 million investment that the Government are making in this area.

Numerous hon. Members mentioned funding. I agree that high-quality childcare supports children’s learning and development and prepares young people for school, as well as having a huge impact on later outcomes. That is why the sector is working really hard to support children and their parents. It is also why the Government have spent more than £3.5 billion in each of the last three years on early education entitlements, and we will continue to support families with their childcare costs.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester rightly pointed out, we announced additional funding of £160 million for 2022-23, £180 million the year after and £170 million the year after that, compared to the current year. That is for local authorities to increase the hourly rates paid to childcare providers and reflects the cost pressures that are anticipated and the changes in the number of eligible children.

So what does that mean? For 2022-23, we will increase the hourly funding rates for all local authorities—by 21p an hour for the disadvantage entitlement for two-year-olds in the vast majority of areas and by 17p an hour for the entitlement for three and four-year-olds.

I want to come on to the point about recruitment and retention, because they are really important.

Local Housing Allowance: Homeless Young People

Debate between Will Quince and Stephanie Peacock

Tuesday 4th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Will Quince)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone, and I thank the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) for securing this important debate. Since my election in 2015, I have been passionate about tackling homelessness. Before my appointment as a Minister, I served as co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on ending homelessness, where I engaged and built relationships with many brilliant charities, a number of which the hon. Lady mentioned, to work with them to end homelessness and rough sleeping.

Since my appointment as Minister, I have worked and continue to work closely with a number of those charities and other organisations to help to inform my work and that of my Department, to ensure that the Department for Work and Pensions does all we can to support those who are at risk of homelessness and that we are getting housing benefit right to provide the support that people need. As a Department we support the wider Government aims and ambitions to end rough sleeping and tackle wider homelessness.

My role as the Minister for welfare delivery has enabled me to go to all parts of the country, and subject to reappointment I look forward to continuing to do so. I have visited a number of charities and organisations around our great country that support those who have experience of homelessness and rough sleeping. That has enabled me to get a better understanding of those issues. I include among those organisations a number of arm’s length management organisations and housing associations that have a role to play.

The hon. Lady will no doubt recognise that this is not an issue that the Department for Work and Pensions can tackle alone. I am working with my counterparts in several Government Departments as part of cross-Government efforts to tackle this issue. Sadly, these debates are always far too short; I have no doubt that the hon. Lady and I could discuss this and associated issues at great length. We could probably spend most of the day talking about the issues she raised: rough sleeping and the broad rental market area in Brighton, local housing allowance, Centrepoint’s analysis and young people under 25 with experience of homelessness, as well, of course, as care leavers, not to mention the point she makes about social housing. I would very much welcome her at the Department to chat through some of those issues at greater length with officials, as appropriate.

I will try to cover as many of the issues as I can in the time left. First, we have to address the elephant in the room, which is the root cause of this issue: in parts of our country, we have massive supply and demand issues. The hon. Lady’s constituency is an example of that; my own constituency is another. As a result, although there are parts of the country where the ambition was to have the local housing allowance rates set at the 30th percentile, there are many parts of the country where the local housing allowance is sub-5%. That represents an issue. The root cause of that—my officials will not like me for saying it—is that successive Governments have failed to build enough houses, in particular affordable housing and homes for social rent. That is something we need to look at.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on securing this important debate. On affordable housing, does the Minister share my concern about the research by the charity Crisis, which showed that cuts to housing benefit mean that in 94% of areas across the country, only one in five private-rented properties are affordable to young single people? Obviously, we need to do much more to tackle that.

[Will Quince]

The hon. Lady is partly right; the solution is not just about local housing allowance. We can continue to pump money into housing benefit, which unfortunately in many parts of the country lines the pockets of private rented sector landlords. But if we are to tackle this in the long term, it is about affordable housing and a mixture of tenure between ownership, affordable housing, which is up to 80% of market rent, and homes for social rent, which is significantly lower. It is about addressing the supply issue as well as the demand issue, to ensure that we tackle the problem for the medium to long term. That is why the Department and I are working closely with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, not to mention the other Government Departments involved. Between us, we hold the key—we hold the housing benefit bill, but they have a lot of the levers to address the supply side.

Universal Credit: Delayed Roll-Out

Debate between Will Quince and Stephanie Peacock

Tuesday 4th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his helpful question and for all the work that he did while at the Department. He, like me, believes that work should always pay, and that we need a welfare system that helps people into work. My mind is full of ideas on how we can improve universal credit, and if he would like to help me in persuading the Treasury to get behind those, I would very much welcome that.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

Barnsley food bank gave out over 4,000 food parcels to people in crisis in a year. The Minister appears to be in complete denial. Why will the Government not accept that the increase in food bank use has a direct link to policies such as universal credit, and that it is about time it was scrapped?

[Will Quince]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question. I could not disagree more, but I do agree with her that I do not want to see anybody feeling that they have no choice but to visit a food bank. I want to better understand this issue, which is why I visit food banks. I meet food bank organisations and other organisations that help to tackle food insecurity. I would be happy to meet the hon. Lady to discuss this further. There is a huge amount of ongoing work.

Child Maintenance Service

Debate between Will Quince and Stephanie Peacock

Tuesday 23rd July 2019 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Will Quince)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time—and hopefully not the last, Sir Edward. I congratulate the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) on securing this important debate on the Child Maintenance Service. I also thank hon. Members from both sides of the House for their contributions, which have been passionate, compelling and based largely on constituency cases. I know that, at the heart of it, everyone is driven by doing the right thing by the children involved.

I have met several hon. Members present to talk through some of the issues that their constituents have raised about the service. I have committed to making sure that we get things right first time. I also had the opportunity to hear directly from single parents during a recent visit to Gingerbread, where I heard at first hand about some of the important issues that they face.

Many points have been raised, so we have a lot to get through in a limited time. I stress that I hold regular surgery sessions, as many hon. Members present know, and I am happy to take offline any of the questions that I cannot cover in my response. I stress that I have been in post for just three months, and I would urge hon. Members across the Chamber not to underestimate my determination, while in this role, to improve the service.

I will start by setting out the Government’s approach. My Department is currently delivering a new child maintenance system, run by the Child Maintenance Service, which is designed to specifically address the shortcomings of the CSA.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

My constituent understood that his case with the Child Support Agency was closed on agreement in 2003, and there had been no attempt to collect any moneys for the past 16 years. It is only as part of this closure programme that my constituent has been contacted and asked to pay £30,000. Does the Minister share my concern that there has been such a big gap and no attempt to collect the money? There is also conflicting guidance implying that some CSA arrears incurred before July 2006 can be statute-barred. Will the Minister clarify that and meet me to discuss the matter further?

[Will Quince]

My door is always open to colleagues from both sides of the House, and I would be happy to meet the hon. Lady to discuss that particular case in detail.

I mentioned the shortcomings of the CSA, which did not provide the right support to parents and was expensive to run. We have learned from mistakes of the past: where the previous system often drove a wedge between parents by taking away their responsibility and choice, the new system encourages collaboration at every stage. We know that a constructive, co-operative relationship between separated parents has a direct positive impact on child outcomes such as health, emotional wellbeing and academic attainment—a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell). That is why, wherever possible, we support separated mothers and fathers to work together in the interests of their children and set up their own family-based maintenance arrangements.

Private family-based arrangements allow families to create flexible arrangements that work for their individual circumstances. Such flexible arrangements can include sharing of care, agreements over who will pay for essentials and treats, and financial transfers. They can change as the children grow and can help children to experience having both their parents take an active role in their lives.

We recognise that, post separation, the majority of parents want to continue to do the right thing for their children. We want to ensure that as many families as possible have an effective arrangement for maintenance in place; for those who are unable to make a private arrangement, the Child Maintenance Service provides the support of a statutory scheme. The Child Maintenance Service delivers a simplified statutory system with increased levels of automation, which allows cases to be processed much more quickly and with higher levels of accuracy than was achieved under previous schemes.

The CMS provides an effective, efficient service, to be used as a last resort where parents are unwilling to meet their responsibility to financially support their children voluntarily. This means that cases in the statutory service tend to be more difficult and relationships between the parents in these cases are often fraught and conflicted. While we continue to use all the tools at our disposal to maintain compliance and recover arrears, it is sadly inevitable that some arrears will accrue, as some parents go to great lengths to avoid their responsibilities. That is not acceptable and we are taking action to tackle it. Last November, this House approved regulations tackling a number of issues—closing down loopholes, introducing tough new sanctions for those who evade their responsibilities, and dealing with the historic arrears that built up under the Child Support Agency.

The hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk and my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr) raised questions about the CMS’s performance. The Child Maintenance Service is performing well. The most recent statistics show that 94% of new applications were cleared within 12 weeks and 79% of change of circumstances actions were cleared within 28 days. We are seeing unprecedentedly high levels of compliance, with 67% of parents due to pay child maintenance through the collect and pay service having paid some maintenance in the quarter ending March 2019, up from 60% one year earlier.

Although the case load on the service has been growing steadily since it opened in 2012, the number of complaints and appeals received still represents less than 1% of that case load. We have continued to refine our processes to maximise compliance and debt recovery. Debt as a proportion of all maintenance arranged by the service has fallen since the launch of the 2012 scheme, from 17% in March 2015 to 11% in March 2019.

A number of colleagues, in particular my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling and the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows), rightly mentioned customer service. The focus so far has largely been on tackling arrears and on recovery of debt, but my clear steer to officials is that I want the focus to be on customer services. We know that more than 80% of calls are answered, although I still think the 20% that are not is too many, and I want them answered in a timely fashion. My focus, while I remain in this role, will be on customer service.

A number of hon. Members raised the issue of enforcement, and we are taking far more action in that regard. We now have several court-based powers, including the use of enforcement agents, otherwise known as bailiffs, to seize goods, forcing the sale of the paying parent’s property. Approximately 7,100 paying parents in England and Wales are currently being pursued by civil enforcement agents for unpaid maintenance following a referral by the CMS.

Hon. Members also mentioned that the service can apply to have the paying parent sanctioned—by being committed to prison or disqualified from driving, for example. In addition to that, in regulations in November last year we launched the ability to disqualify non-compliant parents from holding a UK passport, which we believe will act as a strong deterrent. The service initiated 900 sanctions in the quarter ending March 2019 as a last resort against non-compliant paying parents.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) raised the question of complex earners. We are aware of a small number of parents whose maintenance liability is inconsistent with their financial resources. Some choose to support themselves via a complex arrangement of assets rather than taking a salary. We are taking action to address that.

Parents can request a variation so that most forms of taxable income can be taken into account in the maintenance calculation, which will make it harder for individuals to avoid their responsibilities by minimising the amount of child maintenance they pay. The new powers that we introduced last year allow us to target complex earners via a calculation of notional income based on assets. In addition to the gross annual income provided by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, we can capture income derived from property, savings and investments, including dividends, and other miscellaneous income. We also have the Financial Investigation Unit, which can investigate those parents who declare suspicious earnings or, where appropriate, refer to HMRC for tax fraud.

The FIU was first introduced in 2014, and since 2017 we have tripled the number of staff in that unit. It will look at any case where the receiving parent raises a concern over income and provides basic evidence to support it. I should stress that around 60% of FIU cases show no evidence of suppression of income. Nevertheless, it is an important part of the service. The hon. Gentleman also referred to the self-employed, which I suppose is similar to the situation of complex earners. We have new powers, enabling us to do deep-dive exercises and get to the bottom of cases where individuals are trying to suppress or disguise income. Perhaps I will meet him separately to go through that in a little more detail.

My hon. Friend the Member for Henley raised a number of points about the accuracy of CMS assessments. The accuracy of maintenance assessments has significantly improved; our annual client fund account shows that it is at 99%. Furthermore, the National Audit Office has not qualified CMS accounts for the past two years, which represents a significant improvement.

The hon. Members for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) and for Motherwell and Wishaw brought up the 25% threshold. I understand the concerns that they have raised. The point of the 25% threshold is to ensure that maintenance calculations are relatively stable, so both clients know what to expect in terms of payments. It also ensures that both parents are able to budget with certainty and provide ongoing maintenance for the child. I have met with the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw to discuss this, and it is important to stress that most people’s income does not change to that degree over the course of one year.

My hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Paul Masterton) and the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston—