Universal Credit
Baroness Sherlock Excerpts(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement.
This is a very large pile of sticking plaster. I am glad that some of it is there—it is better than not having it—but in fact it highlights just what a problem lies underneath that which the Government are addressing. For years, Ministers have told the House that all is well with universal credit, and whenever concerns were raised on these or other Benches, they said that we were scaremongering. Whenever charities or churches raised it, they were scaremongering. Even the NAO joined in last June, publishing a damning report about the impact of universal credit. But I am glad that Ministers are beginning to acknowledge that some issues need tackling, and some steps have been taken today which are welcome.
I welcome the increase in work allowances in universal credit. Noble Lords will recall, I am sure, the time in 2015 when my late and sorely missed friend Lady Hollis of Heigham led your Lordships in demanding that the Government think again about those cuts in work allowances. Ministers agreed to do it in tax credits, but they did not for universal credit. But today they have restored £1,000 of that cut, which feels like a good tribute to my noble friend. However, a bit of me feels that it is still only half of what was taken off in that Budget. I am aware that that sounds a bit grudging. I do not like looking a gift horse in the mouth, but if someone gives me two horses then takes them away, then comes back a long time afterwards and gives me one horse, I will still hanker slightly after the two horses that I had in the first place. Your Lordships will forgive me if I am being a bit disgruntled but two horses are better than one. None the less, one horse is better than none. I will stop the metaphor now.
Other things in the Statement are welcome. The decision to roll on other means-tested benefits for two weeks for those moving across to universal credit is good, but the Red Book seems to suggest that that will kick in only from July 2020. Can the Minister clarify whether, if people move across from other benefits any time between now and 2020—for example, because they move into a universal credit area or they have a change of circumstance—they will get no help at all? Will they still be stuck, having to wait five weeks for all this money? What will happen there? I also welcome the minor change to the self-employed rules, but I still think that UC for low-income self-employed people is an absolute mess that will unravel before very long.
The real new announcements today are about managed migration. This really matters because, as the IFS said in its Budget commentary, this is,
“a huge change quite deliberately creating millions of winners and millions of losers. Something like a third … will be at least £1,000 a year worse off under UC than under the legacy system while about a quarter will be at least £1,000 a year better off”.
Ministers keep saying that no one will lose money as a result of moving on to UC. That is not because of generosity; it is because people have transitional protection which says they will not lose out at the point where they move across. However, Ministers do not often tell us that this applies only to some people. There are two ways you can get on to universal credit: through natural migration, where you move to a new area and have a change in circumstances—with this you get no transitional protection; or, at some point between now and three or four years down the road, the Government will move across anyone who is left, in a process that is called managed migration.
As this process is called managed migration, everyone assumed people would be managed. It now turns out they will not be managed at all. They will get a letter saying, “Your benefits are going to be cut off on this date”—I am glad it could be three months rather than one—“and if you don’t make a fresh claim, you will get no money”. If you make a claim after that deadline but within a month, you will get transitional protection; if it is after a month plus a week you will get no transitional protection even if you got your claim in.
Let us bear in mind that this is a complicated process. Around 30% of people who start an online claim give up before it is finished and put into payment. This could be really serious, especially for vulnerable people. The process essentially shifts the burden of responsibility from the state on to the individual, to deal with the consequences of the state moving almost 3 million people from their current benefits; of these, over one-third are either too sick or disabled to work. This is potentially very serious indeed.
The Social Security Advisory Committee had a number of concerns, most of which have been accepted, often in principle. Anyone who has read one of these reports knows that there can be a big difference between accepting something in principle and doing what the committee recommended. One classic example is that the committee suggested that the DWP—rather than making everybody make a fresh claim—could carefully analyse, segment by segment, and look for ways in which certain groups could be carved out and moved across automatically. The DWP simply said no. It said it needed clean data for everybody or that some people such as tax credit recipients may not be eligible. That is not trying. Why will the Government not take up that recommendation and try very hard to see whether some people might not need to make an application?
The Budget announced a further delay to the rollout, which was scored, by my reading, as a net saving to the Government amounting to around £1.2 billion over five years. Can the Minister explain that? I might be completely wrong, but it seems to me that one of the effects of delaying managed migration is that more people will end up moving across to UC on their own—because they move house, have a baby, or their kid leaves home, or whatever. That leaves fewer people at the end. It also means that all those people will not get transitional protection because they were not there at the end, which costs them money but saves the Government money. Does this change make any difference to the number of people who will eventually be in managed migration? The SSAC also raised some real concerns about deliverability. I do not have time today to go through all my outstanding concerns about universal credit. The Minister is shaking her head. Perhaps I can refer her to the questions the committee was asking about operational deliverability; I certainly had a different take from her on that.
I am deeply concerned that this is a sticking plaster while the underlying body is in serious trouble. I believe this could go badly wrong. There is a reason why the Opposition finally ended up calling for the rollout to stop. I am deeply worried that this is not going to work in the way the Government imagine. For 3 million people, as well as all those on the legacy system who will move across sooner, the benefits system is the only thing that stands between many of them and destitution. We cannot afford to get this wrong.
Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)
My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, on her analysis of the changes that have been made. Some are very welcome, but we are still facing a major, dramatic piece of administrative change. It will severely affect vulnerable families who are on low legacy benefits at the moment. I do not think it is safe to do this without somehow making an attempt to get an impact assessment of what the long-term effects will be. This legislation was originally put in place in the Welfare Reform Act 2012. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. We now have some very detailed and complicated regulations. Before we start the process, it would be good to know what the department expects the outcome to be. If we cannot get that, we will to a large extent be flying in the dark.
I welcome the three-month grace period for the minimum statutory notice period for the benefit, but we still have a hard stop at the end of that. Three months is better than one month, but can the Minister explain the sentence in the Secretary of State’s Statement which deals with the one-month period becoming three months? It says that,
“we have unlimited flexibility to extend claim periods for people who need it”.
Can she say what the circumstances are in which someone could claim to need that? Unlimited flexibility could mean that people were not facing a hard stop for legacy benefits, so it would be very useful to understand better what that sentence actually means.
I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and with the Social Security Advisory Committee, that it would be much safer to try to segment some of the clients we are approaching in managed migration to identify vulnerable people. I do not mean vulnerable only in terms of disability and so on, but also in terms of heavy indebtedness, which means that they are unlikely to be able to withstand a long—or indeed any—gap in benefit provision during transition. We know that data is available, because organisations such as Policy in Practice are already stitching together local authority housing benefit data with Treasury, HMRC and DWP data. There is enough material there to anticipate the households that will have real difficulty facing this. I understand the department is saying that the systems do not talk to one another. During the managed migration period, which admittedly does not start for some time yet, we will not, as I understand it, have the advantage of an ability to mash that data and identify vulnerable groups. It can be done by think tanks and research groups; I think it should be done by the department. Proposals to differentiate the impact on different groups of people is, I believe, very important.
Another thing, from a logistics point of view, is that I understand we have to get these regulations done and dusted by the end of the calendar year. The Minister is very good at offering briefing sessions before these regulations hit the Floor; they are affirmative regulations and will need to come to the Floor of the House. I understand the urgency of getting the legality put in place to cover the department for the trial period—the test and learn period—early next year. I plead with the Minister to give us enough time collectively in this House to understand the full significance of all these changes. Some are beneficial, but we are still facing an enormous difficulty that could have a dramatic impact on low-income families in future.
Baroness Buscombe
I begin by welcoming the comments of both noble Lords opposite, who have welcomed at least in part what we have achieved, both through the Budget announcements and the laying of the regulations today.
In response to the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, I say straightaway, up front, that unlike honourable Members in another place who did not seem to realise that we would be debating these regulations, we have—and want—to debate them. They are affirmative measures and we will debate them before the end of the year. Otherwise, if we do not get these regulations through, the transitional protection support for people will be lost; we have to make that very clear. I have pretty much put a date in the diary for my first session. I was going to alert noble Lords after our upcoming recess but, in fact, I will make sure that is sent out to all Peers tomorrow. I want to make sure that any Peer who would like a conversation has one with myself and the Minister of State for Employment—he wants to join me in engaging with all noble Lords. It is really important. We want the opportunity to spell out the detail of these regulations. We are excited about it, not least because we have listened and learned.
I have listened to the noble Baroness opposite; I know, for example, that she had a particular concern—as did the noble Lord—when we met to talk very briefly in private two months ago about what we were trying to do with the one-month minimum term to migrate claimants to UC. We have now moved that to three months. We decided on three months, rather than longer, because in talking to experts and stakeholders we decided that any longer might in fact be a disincentive and unhelpful to claimants. It felt as though it was too long a burden in front of them.
We want to do all we can to work with claimants, working with stakeholders—hence having this period now, after the full rollout of universal credit at the end of this year. We will be spending until July next year going through a test and learn process. Our process will be co-designed with stakeholders to ensure that we have listened and understood claimants’ experiences. We want a process that works well for everyone. We are focusing on building safeguards for vulnerable claimants and ensuring that we have all the necessary information to enjoy a smooth transition, with uninterrupted support.
I would say to the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, that we have decided that we do not want to do anything in terms of migrating claimants without face-to-face or online support because, when we did that, we actually got wrong what we thought would be a smooth, automatic transition from incapacity benefits to ESA—I am going back now to 2011. We got it wrong because we did not always have up-to-date information on people’s circumstances. We did what we call “pre-populate”, and we have decided as a department that that is too dangerous, in case we get it wrong again. We are talking about a huge number of people and we want to get it right.
Therefore, the test and learn process that we are going to go through before beginning the transition will be actually working with claimants who come forward to work with us, testing and trialling how we can make the process better. We have not yet developed the system for managed migration, for the very reason that we want to spend time with everybody: lab sessions, where we use researchers who have recruited claimants; pop-up testing, where researchers have visited job centres, and all the support organisations, homeless shelters and parent and child organisations, to talk to claimants and staff to get this right.
When we do start the managed migration process, we are going to migrate a maximum of only 10,000 people in the first year, which sounds slow, but we think that is the right thing to do. We want to spend all that time checking and making sure that we are right. I will be very happy to come back to your Lordships’ House to keep noble Lords informed of how that process is going, because it is absolutely important that we get it right. We are never going to get 100% of the cases right, but we will do our best.
The important thing is to explain that the two-week support is an additional payment. There will be no gap. That will help people to adjust from being paid two-weekly to four-weekly, but it does not represent any form of gap in transition in terms of payments. It is an additional payment, in addition to the two-week additional housing benefit—which, again, is a one-off cash payment to support people through the process.
I was asked what was meant by my right honourable friend in another place talking about what happens if claimants cannot migrate. We are of the opinion that we should keep the system entirely flexible, so that where a claimant has complex needs or is vulnerable, the work coach can have the option to suggest an extension of the deadline of migration, arrange a home visit or, to be entirely flexible, remove the claimant from the managed migration process entirely. We have to be careful that we do not allow people to fall through the cracks. Let us be clear that this one to three month minimum period is the minimum period for people to manage migrate, but we will be flexible, particularly with those vulnerable claimants who are having difficulty in migrating to the new system.
Baroness Sherlock
Before the Minister sits down, I think she may have inadvertently omitted to answer a couple of my questions. Could I invite her to check the record and write to me?
Child Support (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2018
Baroness Sherlock Excerpts(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for her explanation of the regulations. I also wish that she is back to full ambulatory health soon. I was glad to have the opportunity to give her advance notice of the questions I will raise because some of them are quite technical. It would be great if she could answer them but if not, she should feel free to write to me.
Before I start, I want to pick on where the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, stopped. Most of the people in the House of Lords who have a passionate interest in this are in this room, apart from one or two who could not be here. We have been discussing these issues for a long time. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, saying that he has moved on to a different perspective makes me want to rehearse briefly the fact that having an administrative system of child maintenance is incredibly important. Before it existed, the only way for single parents to get the money they needed to raise their kids was to go to court. It was expensive to get an order, to get it updated and to get it enforced, so the creation of an administrative system of child support really matters. It matters for those kids, the families and the country. It is a statement that you may separate from your partner but you do not cease to be responsible for your children, and the state will enforce that if necessary if the parents cannot afford to do so. I want to lay that on the record.
We should also note that, although the legacy schemes have had a range of problems, billions of pounds have changed hands and gone towards raising children. We should mark that. We should not say simply assume that the problems mean that we do not want to get this right going forward. The obligation to support your children is there, so I share the view that it would be good to have an opportunity to discuss more broadly the issues around child support policy. However, since Parliament has determined the amounts that should be paid by non-resident parents to parents with care, getting that enforced really matters and the regulations address that. In the light of that, I should flag up a historic and now rather distant remunerated interest as I was a non-executive director of CMEC for a time.
In essence, these regulations do two things. They allow the Government to write off significant debts arising from historic schemes and they introduce some new compliance measures to help with collecting future child maintenance. I want to look at each of those in turn to see whether it feels like a balanced package.
First, on the debt proposals, the Explanatory Memorandum says that there are uncollected arrears of £3.7 billion, with £2.5 billion owed to parents and £1.2 billion owed to the Government. DWP thinks that it would be too expensive to try to collect all this, so it proposes to separate the debt into two parts: that which it will make one last attempt to collect and that which it will simply write off. Where there has not been a payment in the last three months and, as the Minister explained, a CSA case started on or before 1 November 2008 and the debt is more than £1,000, or the case started after that date and the debt is more than £500, it will ask clients if they want it to try to collect the debt. If no representations are received, or collection of the debt is not possible, it may be written off. Can the Minister tell us how those representations will be sought? Will each parent to whom money is owed be written to individually?
Secondly, where there has been no payment in the last three months and the case started on or before 1 November 2008 and the debt is less than £1,000, or the case started after 1 November 2008 and the debt is less than £500, or the debt is less than £65, then the debt can be written off without asking the parents at all. Can the Minister tell us, if there had been a payment of some sort in the last three months, irrespective of how much was involved or when it started, would attempts carry on being made to collect the debt, even if it did not meet these criteria? If so, is there not a risk of what is known in the trade as moral hazard? In other words, does it not risk sending out a message to parents who have not paid to support their kids that if they simply do not pay for long enough, the Government will give up and they will benefit from having the debt written off?
To justify writing off historic debt while avoiding the moral hazard charge, it is incumbent on the Government to show that current child maintenance liabilities are being effectively enforced—a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. So is that the case? As the noble Lord mentioned, the current rate of compliance is 57% and it has been static for the last two years. Ministers are partly arguing that these regulations would add to the range of collection and enforcement powers the department has to drive up that statistic. Let us see whether we think they would.
There are basically three measures. First, the deductions from joint and unlimited partnership accounts, which is a welcome measure designed to prevent non-resident parents from evading their financial obligations by moving all their money into joint or unlimited partnership accounts. However, I would like to raise a point made in paragraph 11 of the 39th report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. It reports a concern—raised in a submission to the committee, on which the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood sits—that the proposal to notify the other account holders of the intention to make regular or lump sum deductions and give them a set period to make representations could give the non-resident parent time to move the cash somewhere else.
The committee noted that the regulations provide that the interim order must include an instruction to the deposit-taker not to do anything that would reduce the amount standing to the credit of the account below the amount specified in the order. However, the Explanatory Memorandum also goes on to say that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary—the Minister reinforced this today—it will be assumed that the NRP has a share of the funds equal to that of any other account holder. So, if the deposit-taker is required only to keep in the account an amount equivalent to that specified in the order, is there not a risk that, in some cases, only a portion of that retained balance can be attributed to the non-resident parent, and therefore, when it comes to the attempt to reclaim it, there will not be enough left to meet the debt? What are the Government doing about that? I did say this was technical.
Secondly, I want to look at the effect of this measure. The self-certified impact assessment says that DWP expects that the use of this measure will result in 350 requested deduction orders from joint personal accounts in England and Wales per year and 170 from unlimited partnership business accounts. Based on the pattern of their use for sole accounts, DWP assumed 34% will be lump sum deduction orders and 66% regular deduction orders, and it expects a 60% success rate. When you crunch these numbers down—which I did because I am very sad—it means that, adding together personal joint accounts and unlimited partnership business joint accounts, you get a total of basically not very much. My sums suggested this meant that the department expected to issue only 100 successful lump-sum DOs and 200 successful regular DOs, which would have brought in about £350,000 a year in extra child maintenance.
However, about half an hour before I came into the Committee, I saw a letter—just published—from Justin Tomlinson to Frank Field, chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee, in which he said that DWP analysis after the consultation estimated that these new powers would actually enable an extra 400 to 500 actions per year, yielding around £840,000 in additional maintenance. The letter said that the department thought the figure might be even higher still. Can the Minister tell the Grand Committee the current estimate of the number of cases in which these powers are likely to be used, and how much extra maintenance the department expects to collect?
Another question is on the confiscation of passports. The instrument also commences a power, set out in Sections 39B to 39G of the Child Support Act 1991, enabling the Secretary of State to apply to the court for an order to disqualify a non-resident parent who is wilfully refusing to pay from holding or obtaining a UK passport. This is again welcome but I wonder how well it would be used. The 39th report of the scrutiny committee quoted the department as saying:
“This measure will be used as a last resort, where all other enforcement actions have been found to be inappropriate or ineffective”.
When I went back to the methodology document that accompanied the consultation, it said that DWP expected approximately 20 cases per year where a court sanction would be applied. But then it became clear that that would be not 20 passports a year but 20 cases where court sanctions could be applied. Those sanctions might be passport removal but might be losing a driving licence or going to prison. That could mean this new power on passports might be in single-figure usage.
Again, the letter to Frank Field from Justin Tomlinson suggested that this power could be used in around 20 cases a year. Can the Minister explain whether that is 20 cases of passport confiscation a year or whether we are still talking about 20 cases of court sanctions a year, of which some may or may not be on passports? Either way, it is a very small number. Clearly, I realise that it is intended to be a deterrent as well but that was said of driving licences, yet we are still stuck at 57% enforcement. We have to ask: how effective is this likely to be?
The third and final category is on including major assets in the calculation of child maintenance liabilities. There has been lots of pressure on DWP for a long time to reinstate the lifestyle variation available under the previous regime, by which parents could request a variation to the calculation based on a disparity between the lifestyle of a non-resident parent and the income which they reported. Charities such as Gingerbread, along with the Work and Pensions Select Committee, have pressed DWP on this but to no avail. One of the presenting problems has been parents complaining that the NRP claims to have a low income, yet possesses considerable assets and a lifestyle that should be impossible on the income that he or she is declaring.
However, DWP decided not to do that. This is one of its proposals to deal with it instead by including major assets in the calculation of child maintenance liabilities. That is welcome but the scrutiny committee remains concerned about how it is to be done—a point alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, who mentioned yachts. I do not often get to talk about yachts in my brief but it is the case that a specific submission was made to the committee of a parent who said that her former spouse had bought a yacht, yet nobody could make him pay over the amount of cash he was meant to do as support for the children.
It would seem from that case that there is a real situation out there. Yet in its 41st report, the committee managed to establish from DWP that the definition of asset does not include high-value items such as a yacht or a Rolls-Royce, because it is too hard to value them. In fact, the report said:
“This would seem to confirm our concern that the Non-Resident Parent can find ways of avoiding payment by buying goods with their cash assets and reinforces our view that the new formula for calculating income may make little actual difference”.
Given that that is the whole point of this power, can the Minister explain how the Government plan to deal with this issue and, again, how often DWP anticipates using these provisions?
In conclusion, we are in a position where compliance rates are stuck at 57%. I am doubtful that the package of powers we are discussing are likely to make all that much difference given that the biggest of them will, in the original calculations, affect only 450 children and bring in £350,000 a year. Alongside that, the Government are planning to write off debts of £3.7 billion, so basically we are talking about 0.01% of the amount that has been written off. Even if it is the higher £840,000 figure, my back-of-an-envelope calculations say that we are still talking about 0.02%. There is quite an imbalance.
I remain concerned about those who are slipping through the net—the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, raised this. In 2012, DWP estimated that 56% of CSA clients who chose not to apply to the statutory service would make a family-based arrangement. A survey by NatCen conducted between June 2015 and September 2016 found that three months after the CSA cases had been closed, only 18% had a family-based arrangement in place. A similar number had gone to the CMS but 56% had nothing in place.
Employment and Support Allowance
Baroness Sherlock Excerpts(5 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating that Answer. This week we learned that 180,000 sick and disabled people have been underpaid vital social security. The problem goes back to 2011 when the Government began migrating people on to ESA from incapacity benefit, but did it wrongly. In many cases, they migrated them across to contribution-based benefit when they would have been entitled to income-based benefit, which means that they could have got other payments, such as severe disability payment premiums and the like.
Initially Ministers said that they were allowed to pay claimants back money only until 2014, until CPAG went to court—at which point, they changed their minds. At the time of that migration an independent expert working for the DWP, Professor Malcolm Harrington, urged Ministers not to proceed until he was certain that the system was robust. But they did. Last July, the Public Accounts Committee published a scathing report about this error, in which it suggested that some people had lost out by as much as £20,000. It described the DWP as being defensive and unwilling to listen to warnings, which is very worrying. Claimants are now getting money, but in some cases it seems they have no idea how the sums were arrived at. The DWP now estimates that it is going to pay £1 billion as a result of this very serious error.
Will the Minister tell us, first, what steps are being taken to ensure that all claimants will be compensated for the lost value of passported benefits such as free school meals, NHS prescriptions or dentistry treatment? Secondly, what compensation will be paid to claimants on top of the arrears? Many of those will have found themselves forced into rent arrears, some into destitution. All of this costs money. How much compensation will they get for it? Thirdly, the DWP has identified those whom it knows to be terminally ill. How is it going to go about maintaining that, to include people who become terminally ill while the review carries on until the end of next year? What systems are in place to identify those people and prioritise their cases? Finally, and most importantly, what lessons has the DWP learned from this to ensure that it listens to the many warnings about universal credit migration and does not make the same mistakes?
Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, first, I will respond to the noble Baroness by referencing passported benefits, which are of course the responsibility of each government department. It would be impractical for the DWP to undertake an exercise to uncover who might have been entitled to those other passported benefits. However, we are talking to other departments to make them aware of the issue. In terms of compensation, it is important to make it very clear that no one saw a cash reduction when they were transferred to ESA. This is about extra money that they might have been entitled to. Also, it is really important to explain that we are learning lessons from this. The key lesson is that it is a mistake to try to prepopulate information without being in touch with claimants. It is very important for us to make sure, when we are changing benefits or introducing new benefits, that we do so in a way that involves working with claimants so that, rather than trying to be clever with a seamless process, we actually engage. That is what we are doing now, with what will be 800 people working with claimants to get this right.
Personal Independence Payment
Baroness Sherlock Excerpts(5 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, there has been a very strong focus, particularly in recent months, on mental health conditions. PIP has a much better understanding of non-physical conditions such as mental health conditions than existed under DLA. Indeed, overall, 65% of PIP recipients whose main disabling condition is a mental health one are getting the enhanced rate of the daily living component, compared to only 22% of mental health recipients under DLA; and 33% of PIP recipients whose main disabling condition is a mental health one are getting the enhanced rate of the mobility component, compared to only 10% of mental health recipients receiving the higher rate of the DLA mobility component. PIP is showing a greater and more generous focus regarding delivery for those with mental health conditions.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister seems to think that tribunal decision rates do not reflect quality. If 71% of cases are overturned at tribunal—for example, the figure for JSA is only 36%—something has gone badly wrong. The noble Lord, Lord Low, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Winchester, mentioned the case of the chairman of Scope, who has Parkinson’s and incurable prostate cancer. At two subsequent assessments he was awarded 11 points; you need eight to get PIP. At last March’s assessment, he got only two. His Parkinson’s is progressive and now very severe, and his prostate cancer is incurable. He has described the experience of navigating this as Kafkaesque, complex and unprofessional. I think any noble Lord who has ever spoken to a single person who has navigated this will recognise that. What are the Government going to do about this?
Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, I absolutely hear what the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, is saying. But I think it is really important to stress that we genuinely believe the PIP system is working, and it is a vast improvement on the DLA system. It is not perfect and we are constantly looking to improve it, but it is only right that support is targeted at those disabled people who require the most assistance to lead independent lives, and personal independence payment will achieve that. But key to the benefit is a more objective assessment which allows us accurately and consistently to assess individual needs. We are focusing more on training the assessors and working with champions to support them, to improve the outcomes right from the start.
Domestic Abuse: Universal Credit Payments
Baroness Sherlock Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, we have a range of measures to ensure that a family’s basic needs are met, including housing benefit and universal credit housing support. Victims do not need a bank account to claim immediate advance payments from universal credit to cover immediate needs. Fast-track payments can be made into alternative accounts to avoid rent arrears. In addition, child maintenance fees are excepted and a parent can apply for child benefit to be paid direct to them. Work coaches may also signpost and refer domestic violence victims to organisations that can provide further support.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I wonder whether the Minister has properly understood what Members of the House are saying to her today. The old system used to separate out payments for children, which were paid every two weeks to the main carer, and in-work benefits, which were paid directly into the bank account of the main earner. Universal credit has taken all these payments, and housing payment, and made them available only once a month, all into the bank account of one partner. What happens in practice if the relationship breaks down? The Government have been very good at recognising that financial and economic abuse are part of domestic abuse. It means that a person, often a woman, who is in that situation simply has no access to funds to protect herself and her children. Will the Government please listen? The Scottish Government consulted and decided to commit to going to split payments. Will the Government please think again?
Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, with regard to Scotland, the Scottish Government have discussed split payments with stakeholders and are now starting to think about developing their own policy. We will continue to watch and observe how that proceeds. But I have entirely understood what we are talking about today and I think it is really important to make clear that we want to simplify the system for everyone making claims under universal credit. It is important that we simplify the system. Noble Lords shake their heads, but we want to treat people in the normal way, whereby they have a joint approach, in most instances, to receipt of their income, to managing their household bills and to managing how they can cover their costs on a monthly basis—but with exceptions where people who are suffering abuse or any other kind of coercive action can ask for and will be given split payments as a matter of course.
Employment and Support Allowance
Baroness Sherlock Excerpts(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating that Answer—another day, another DWP mistake. Back in 2011, 70,000 sick and disabled people were underpaid thousands of pounds after they had been migrated from incapacity benefit to contributory-based employment support allowance, without the possibility being recognised that they had paid enough stamps to entitle them to non-contributory ESA. The result was to deny them access to additional premia that they might have been able to get had the Government done that correctly.
The error here is that the Government have now accepted their mistake but have decided that people’s payments could be backdated only to 2014, because in 2014 a tribunal judgment made it clear that the Government had been doing this the wrong way. Yet again, therefore, it took a small charity to go to court to judicially review the department. And yet again, at the very last minute the DWP caves in and says, “Fair enough, we will now backdate payments to 2011”.
This raises a couple of questions. The scale is enormous: the National Audit Office said that the decision not to go back before October 2014 would have resulted in that group of disabled claimants losing out to the tune of between £100 million and £150 million. Individuals might be entitled to up to £10,000 of wrongly underpaid benefits.
There is a pattern to this. Six reviews are in progress to identify disabled people who may be entitled to back-payments, five as a result of legal cases against the Government. I therefore have two questions for the Government. First, why did it yet again take a tiny charity—the CPAG, to which I pay tribute—to use money donated to it to go to court to get Ministers to do the right thing? Secondly, there is the systemic issue: the PAC, in its report on ESA, and the NAO, in its report on universal credit, described a department that was defensive when dealing with outside organisations, and unwilling to listen to warnings about problems that were occurring. What steps, therefore, is the Minister’s department taking to make sure that in future it listens to warnings—from inside and outside—and does not wait until someone takes it to court?
Baroness Buscombe
I thank the noble Baroness for her response. I turn straightaway to her point about restricting—as it were—the payments. Initially the department believed that we were legally restricted to calculating repayments from 2014 due to a statutory rule—Section 27 of the Social Security Act 1998—which governs the position with regard to payment of arrears when a court of tribunal finds that the department has made an error of law. Following a thorough investigation, however, we realised that this interpretation was incorrect. We have made this very clear in previous Statements to the House and we have made it clear that we have been working extremely hard to do everything we can to correct a mistake that should never have been made in the first place. We believed, however, that the law prevented our paying benefit back to the date of conversion. We now understand that we can do that. We have listened to a range of opinions, including those of the CPAG, undertaken a thorough investigation of the legal position and realised that the law that dictated that we could not do this in the first place was wrong.
We want to be sure, therefore, that we pay back everything that is owed. I would add that the staff have been working extremely hard to put this right and to help everybody who may have lost out from these payments since the whole process of migrating people from incapacity benefit to ESA began in 2008.
Universal Credit
Baroness Sherlock Excerpts(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating that deeply unsatisfactory Statement. This is quite extraordinary. The Comptroller and Auditor-General has been forced to issue an open letter to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to point out that she repeatedly misrepresented to Parliament the content of the highly critical NAO report on the rollout of universal credit. She has now apologised, up to a point, for one of the errors, in which she wrongly claimed that the NAO wanted UC rolled out more quickly.
However, Sir Amyas challenged two other misleading claims for which she has not apologised. The Secretary of State claimed that the NAO report had not taken account of the impact of recent changes to universal credit, even though her department had agreed the report just one week earlier, based on the latest information, and she repeated her unfounded claim that universal credit is working. Sir Amyas pointed out that the DWP has not even measured how many UC claimants are facing difficulties and hardship. I was particularly disappointed to see her repeat the claim that universal credit will help an extra 200,000 people into work, even though the NAO said:
“The Department will never be able to measure whether Universal Credit actually leads to 200,000 more people in work”,
because it is not able to separate other factors.
Anyone can misspeak—goodness knows, I have done it myself—but if the NAO says there is not and never can be evidence for a claim, you cannot simply say that it is a matter of interpretation. This is dangerous ground. The Secretary of State is entitled to her own opinion; she is not entitled to her own facts. The Government have told this House too many times that all is well with universal credit when manifestly that is not the case, so I have just two questions for the Minister. First, will the Government stop pretending that all is well and will they, in particular, stop using the misleading 200,000 figure and start telling the House how things really are? Secondly, will they implement all the recommendations in the NAO report? The DWP needs to put things right before anybody else is put through the misery of universal credit.
Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, first, I make it absolutely clear to your Lordships’ House that right from the start, when the report was published, there has been no issue with the factual information that the National Audit Office has used. In collating that information, there has been and continues to be a strong relationship between the National Audit Office, the Department for Work and Pensions and the officials. That is important. It is the interpretation of these facts and the conclusions drawn as a result that the department questions, as I said in the Statement. A lot of it is about context rather than saying that there is any issue with the facts.
We are absolutely clear that, as the report says, the National Audit Office completed its independent review of the universal credit programme after analysing evidence that we collected between August 2017 and April 2018. The issue we have is that we are still not able to judge, and nor is anyone, the full impact of significant policy changes that we have announced and implemented since the Budget last autumn. They include extending advances, which was implemented in January 2018, removing waiting days in February 2018 and the housing benefit run-on. The report makes it clear that it is referencing evidence up to April 2018. On the housing benefit run-on, it was impossible for us to measure the extra two weeks’ additional cash to cover people transferring from the old legacy benefit on to universal credit, which they would not have to repay. Each of these measures will take time to impact on the experience of claimants and stakeholders. Although some of these measures were mentioned in the report, their impact would not have been felt during the evidence-gathering period.
Bereavement Benefits
Baroness Sherlock Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, when an individual registers the death of their spouse or civil partner, the registrar provides information on how to contact the Department for Work and Pensions bereavement service. That includes giving advice on what benefits will be available, including the bereavement support payment. The time limit for claiming the initial lump sum is now more generous, at 12 months from the date of death—that is £2,500 for those who do not have dependent children and £3,500 for those who do. The time limit is three months from the date of death for claiming the additional monthly bereavement support payment, which is £100 a month for 18 months for those without children and £350 for those with dependent children. We take every opportunity to encourage claimants to make a claim for bereavement support as early as possible.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, when the Government brought this in, they said that it was not about saving money—although, as it happens, it will cost less than half what the old system did. They said that the aims were to be simple and encourage self-dependency, but we are talking about people who got married, had children and thought that they would be looking after themselves as a family until the worst possible thing happened. We end up then with somebody becoming a single parent; they are themselves bereaved and having to raise children who are bereaved. That is surely the situation for which the welfare state was pretty much invented. If the Government are going to think again, would they please think really hard, recycle some of those savings and do the right thing?
Baroness Buscombe
The noble Baroness will know that those in need of additional income-related benefits will receive them, as well as child benefit for those with dependent children, for example. This is not a cost-cutting exercise. We are investing an extra £40 million in each of the first two years after the reform. This is a modernisation of an outdated system, which relates to a time when women were not expected to work and, indeed, there were not jobs available for them. We are spending more than £95 billion on working-age benefits to help those in need. People in receipt of the bereavement support payment can access other parts of the welfare system if they need it. With regard to being a lone parent, it is important to add that the problem with the old system was that, if one remarried or went into a civil partnership, one lost that entitlement altogether. People do not lose it under this system.
Personal Independence Payment
Baroness Sherlock Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating that Answer. This refers to the fact that the First-tier Tribunal ruled that two claimants with chronic conditions were entitled to PIP. The Secretary of State appealed but withdrew the appeals shortly before the Upper Tribunal was due to hear them on 21 May. The appeals concerned the meaning of daily living activity 3. One claimant needed watching at night in case urgent treatment were needed to prevent him falling into a fatal diabetic coma. The tribunal decided that he should qualify for PIP. According to the lawyers representing him, the Government argued in the appeal that he should be awarded only one of the minimum eight points needed to qualify for PIP.
This is the second time in a year that we are debating a serious error of judgment by the DWP in lawfully implementing the benefit it created. Noble Lords will remember that the High Court previously ruled against the Government on mobility payments, and in January the Government said that they were no longer appealing that judgment, either.
Normally when we ask questions on the meaning of judgments—and in the past when I have raised questions—Ministers stand up and say, “We are really generous to disabled people”, and the same thing has happened in another place. That is not a conversation. So I urge the Minister today to listen carefully to the questions and to try to answer them as best she can, and to write to us if she cannot. I have two. First, will she tell the House how many other cases are potentially affected by this ruling, and over what period and by what means her department will identify these people and notify them? Secondly, have Ministers taken legal advice on whether the regulations rushed through in March 2017 are definitely lawful?
Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, it gives me pleasure to respond to the noble Baroness. First, let me make it clear that, in our amendments to the regulations in March 2017, we were responding not to an error in the policy or in the PIP system but to a lack of clarity. The March 2017 amendments clarify the department’s position going forward, and further litigation is therefore unnecessary. The Secretary of State made it clear when she first arrived at the department that she wanted to withdraw these appeals on the basis that she wanted to provide these claimants with certainty. I want to be clear that this Urgent Question relates to the withdrawal of two appeals on 18 May and is about two specific cases. Therefore, there is no question about how many other cases it is concerned with and over what period.
On legal advice, we always confer and consult with lawyers to ensure that we are, to the best of our ability, making the right decisions on the regulations. We are clear in our minds that the regulations as they stand are lawful.
British and Irish Sign Language
Baroness Sherlock Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Baroness Buscombe
My Lords, I thank my noble friend. I entirely agree with him that in supporting access to communication for everyone, the exciting work of the NHS in fitting cochlear implants to babies and children is one example of why, as the Minister of State for Disabled People has said, it is clear that there is now a wealth of technological solutions with the power to make a real difference to someone’s ability to progress in education and also to find and keep a job. This means that we can use more of our devices. It offers more opportunities and a wider range of ways in which people can break down the barriers of hearing impairment. Of course, the majority of people with a hearing impairment are elderly and for the most part they do not use sign language.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, I am sure the Minister would not in any way mean to suggest that people who use BSL should be thinking about other ways of communicating. I want to bring her back to the fact that in 2016, the Department for Work and Pensions introduced VRS for some of its services as a result of a recommendation from the DWP Select Committee that the department ought to be more accessible to BSL users. The Government said at the time:
“In the future, it is hoped that VRS can be rolled out across DWP’s complete range of services”.
I have had a look at the website and some services, such as applying for ESA or PIP, do seem to be available via this mechanism. But I looked on the universal credit website and could find no reference to it at all. Are the Government now saying that they no longer wish to do this at all and will therefore not be rolling it out, or that they will be rolling it out but have not got round to it yet?
Baroness Buscombe
I assure the noble Baroness that there is no question of our not supporting the use of BSL services. In fact, good, accessible services are the best way to remove or overcome barriers that BSL users and people with hearing loss face. We have worked closely with deaf people and their organisations on delivering improvements across a wide range of services, including those provided by the Department for Work and Pensions and across much of the public sector; this is also the case in private companies such as Barclays, Lloyds, Sky and Virgin Media. The reality is that a growing number of organisations in the private, public and voluntary sectors are providing access to their services for deaf BSL users via the video relay services. With respect to the Department for Work and Pensions, I reassure her that there is no question of our not considering this service for UC rollout, but I will certainly take that point back to the department to ensure that that is the case.