Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Tuesday 17th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that introduction to the Bill and I look forward to the debate, especially to the four maiden speakers.

In his speech to the last Conservative Party conference, the Prime Minister talked of the need to tackle social problems, including entrenched poverty, in our country. Why? He said this:

“So when the new mum looks at her new-born baby—the most precious thing she’s ever seen—and she vows to provide for it, she knows she actually can”.

This Bill makes a mockery of that pledge. It is a sustained assault on low-income families. It will increase poverty, penalise working households and push more families out of their homes and into temporary accommodation, homelessness or on to housing benefit, and the evidence base for it is poor. So often, I am sorry to say, this Government’s cuts to social security end up being counterproductive, adding more to the benefit bill by undermining work incentives or raising spending elsewhere.

A good example is the proposal to cut social sector rents by 1% a year. This sounds great, but, as the IFS points out, it does little for the 93% of tenants who will lose housing benefit pound-for-pound as their rents falls. As the IFS points out:

“The policy largely represents a transfer from social landlords … to the exchequer, rather than to social tenants”.

As the OBR has pointed out, it will mean fewer social sector properties being built. Social landlords risk having their credit ratings downgraded, planned investments are being cancelled and if specified or all supported housing becomes unviable, costs are simply transferred to the NHS and local government.

As the Minister mentioned, the Bill abolishes the scheme that gives help to some people on benefits to pay the interest on their mortgages so that they do not lose their homes and end up on housing benefit. In future, they will be offered a nine-month wait then the option of a loan secured by a charge on the property. Almost half of recipients are of pensionable age, despite the Government’s pledge to protect pensioner benefits. We will seek, as the Bill goes through, to retain support for low-income pensioners, who may never be able to pay off a loan.

The Bill also takes £30 a week, one-third of their employment and support allowance, from the 500,000 sick and disabled people in the work-related activity group. The impact assessment reassures us that if they worked for just five hours a week at the new higher minimum wage rate, they could recoup the money, but these are people an independent assessor has decided are unfit for work. They include people with learning difficulties, mental health issues, Parkinson’s disease or MS. Only 5% of that group will get back to work within a year. We can see no justification for making people poorer to incentivise them back to work they have been deemed unfit to do. How can the Minister justify this, especially in the light of the manifesto commitment not to cut disability benefits?

The other measures in the Bill all hit low-income families with children. Child poverty has already risen by 400,000 since 2010 and is predicted to rise by another 300,000 by 2020. Two-thirds of poor children will have a parent in work. Those figures could explain why the Bill decides to remove the requirement to measure child poverty or to do anything to reduce it. It abandons the internationally recognised benchmark for poverty because the Government have decided poverty is no longer about money. The Bill expunges the word “poverty” from the legislation. We all accept that deprivation is multifaceted. By all means measure other things as well, but the idea that poverty is not really about money is risible. I fear that what is really happening is that the Government are trying to hide the trail of devastation their reforms are leaving in their wake.

Successive government welfare reforms are hitting the same groups of people, yet Ministers consistently refuse to do a cumulative impact assessment, and now they will not even count child poverty. This will not do. The first rule of power surely means that if you will the ends, you must will the means and you must know and take responsibility for the consequences of your decisions. I hope this House will see fit to challenge that proposal as the Bill goes through.

Then there is the benefit cap. When the Government introduced it, their whole argument was that it was set at the level of average earnings. We had a long debate in this House on whether the test was fair. I remember marching into the Lobby behind the much-missed Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, who proposed an amendment to remove child benefit from the cap on the grounds that people would get child benefit as well. We voted for it. Now Ministers have ditched the entire standard and simply plucked figures out of the air. They have simply decided that they are going to cut the cap by £3,000 for families in London and by £6,000 for families elsewhere. In future, Ministers can change the cap at whim by regulation without reference to any external benchmark and with minimal parliamentary scrutiny. The evidence is nowhere near as strong as even the impact assessment has suggested. Housing providers are worried that rent arrears will rise, as will evictions and homelessness. We have heard that £800 million has already been set aside for discretionary housing provision to deal with it. In Committee, we will want to see a great deal more evidence about the cost-benefit analysis of this policy, as well as about the impact on families.

The Minister mentioned that DWP is changing conditionality in universal credit. At the moment, parents are expected to work when their youngest child turns five. The Bill will mean that parents on universal credit will be expected to work when their youngest turns three. They will have to do work-related activity when their youngest is two and when the youngest reaches one, they will be out doing work preparation interviews. If the Government are going to push mothers of very young children and babies into work preparation activity, they need to be a lot more convincing about the availability and affordability of suitable childcare than they have been in this House in recent months when the Childcare Bill was going through.

Then there is the benefit freeze. Previously, the retail prices index was used to uprate benefits. Then the Government came along and decided that CPI was the measure—the only thing that would do—so they changed it to CPI. Then in 2013, they decided it would be reduced to just 1%, as a temporary measure, rather than CPI. Now it will be 0%, whatever happens to inflation during this Parliament. If inflation carries on flatlining, the Government may not get the savings they have been hoping for. There is a real process issue here. This is undermining the long-standing convention by which Ministers are meant to make an assessment annually of what poor households need to live on, come to the House and propose an alternative, and take responsibility for what should happen to benefits. This is moving away from that, which is deeply regrettable.

Finally, there is the proposal the Minister outlined to change universal credit and tax credits to abolish the family premium for all families with children and to limit the amount paid per child to the first two children in a household. This means that 3.7 million households will lose money. The two-child limit will cut payments by up to £2,780 per child per year, affecting 640,000 families by 2021 and 150,000 families with disabled children.

The Government repeatedly stress that the aim of their welfare reforms is to get people into work but child tax credit and universal credit are paid to working families as well as those who are out of work. If the aim is not to get families into work, what is it? The impact assessment said that,

“people may respond to the incentives that this policy provides and may have fewer children”.

I should like to ask the Minister some questions. First, is the objective that people in low-paid work should have fewer children, or is it just to give them less money? What does the Minister expect to happen in the 16% of pregnancies in the UK that are unplanned? What assessment has he made of the impact on adoption and kinship care, especially of sibling groups? Will there not be a disincentive to remarry if a stepfamily would then have more than two children in the household? The equality impact assessment is silent on religion and belief; can the Minister tell the House what work his department has done in assessing whether this policy will be likely to affect people of some religions more than those of others or of none. We are also told in the impact assessment that the Government will exempt women who have a third child as a result of rape. I wonder if the Minister has really thought through the implications of a woman having to prove to the Department for Work and Pensions that her pregnancy was the result of rape.

Even if the Minister could answer all those questions robustly, this policy spectacularly fails the Government’s own family test. There are reasons the state has traditionally helped with the cost of raising children. First, it is to avoid British children growing up in poverty, since child poverty is significantly higher in larger families. The real losers of this policy will be children born into larger families, especially as younger siblings, through no choice of their own. Secondly, it is because children are good for society. Maybe if I use the language of economics the Minister will work with me on this. In economic terms, children are a public as well as a private good. Parents bear the bulk of the costs of raising their children but we all contribute through our taxes because we want to see the next generation thrive and, being practical, as our population ages, we need to ensure that there are enough people around of working age to pay for our pensions, our health service and our social care. Most of all, it is because children are not a luxury. We give child tax credit to families to ensure they can afford to raise their children healthily.

Let us be clear: this is not about the small number of people with lots of children who are not in work. They would be caught by the benefit cap anyway. Shelter pointed out that the benefit cap would kick in for a couple with two children renting a house not in Mayfair but in Leeds or Plymouth. It is not about them. It is about a family with three children who, despite working very hard, are struggling to make ends meet. It is about the mum I met who never thought she would need state help until her husband disappeared and left her with three children. It is about all those people who had children confident they could provide for them, until something happened—perhaps a parent died or became sick or disabled and could not work; perhaps they had their hours cut or got made redundant. These are all things our welfare state is meant to protect us against. When the Minister says it affects only people making new claims, anybody making a fresh claim for universal credit next year will get no help for their third child already in existence.

When Mr Cameron spoke about that mum looking down at her new baby and knowing she could provide for it, the reason she knows that is that she lives in a country that offers the safety net of the welfare state alongside the National Health Service and state education. Our welfare state was never about workers helping workless or rich helping poor. It is about pooling risk across our life cycles and across our population. There are times, such as when children are young, when it is hard to make ends meet even if you are working. The best laid plans can go also astray. Anyone can get cancer, lose their job, lose their spouse or have a disabled child. We will all get old—we hope—and draw a pension. When things go well we pay in, and when things go badly we take out. The Government’s reforms undermine that. They change the way our welfare state works, by undermining work incentives, breaking the link between need and support and refusing to protect the next generation from growing up in poverty. If the Bill goes through unchanged, when that mum described by the Prime Minister looks down at her newborn baby, especially if it is her third child, she can no longer know that she can provide for it because that safety net will have a child-sized hole in it.

Employment

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Altmann]

My Lords, we understand that the position in Redcar is terribly distressing for all the families involved, and the Government are already addressing this issue. There are measures already in place to help the workers affected to retrain. The Government are committed to full employment, and there are record numbers of people in work. We have had tremendous success in helping people back into work and we will continue to do that for Redcar and around the country

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister did not mention that over a third of the new jobs created between 2010 and 2014 were people becoming self-employed, and that those jobs tend to be less secure and lower paid. Will the Minister therefore confirm that self-employed people will not benefit from what the Government call the new living wage—the higher minimum rate for the over-25s—and yet will still lose through the changes to tax credits? What are the Government doing to compensate them?

[Baroness Altmann]

My Lords, self-employment is a very important route into work for many people, particularly many women, and we have set up, under Julie Dean, an independent review of any barriers to self-employment that may exist. We will also continue to work with the noble Baroness, Lady Mone, in supporting start-ups for disadvantaged communities.

Housing: Underoccupancy Charge

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, can I come back to the Question—

[Baroness Eaton]

Could my noble friend the Minister say what Her Majesty’s Government have done to support local authorities in mitigating the effects of this policy?

Families: Work Incentives

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Sherlock]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what progress is being made on work incentives for families with children.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)]

Universal credit improves incentives to enter into and progress in work. Early results show that current UC claimants do more to look for work, enter work quicker and earn more than current JSA claimants. Childcare costs are a key issue for working families, which is why we are increasing support and provision.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister. I appear to be inadvertently topical, for which I apologise.

As well as the tax credit cuts of recent celebrity, the Government have announced that they are reducing the work allowances in universal credit. The Work and Pensions Select Committee in the Commons heard yesterday that when the minimum wage is fully rolled out in 2020 a single parent, who is now able to work 22 hours a week before losing universal credit, because of these changes will be able to work only 10 hours a week before losing universal credit.

Increasingly, commentators are worried that the Government’s vision that universal credit would make work pay is getting eroded by a series of changes, so I shall ask the Minister’s for reassurance on two points. First, can he assure the House that when universal credit comes in fully the gains to work will be as strong as the Government promised us when the Welfare Reform Bill went through? Secondly, would he consider running a briefing session—perhaps after the CSR—to unpick some of the detail about how work incentives work in practice with all the changes that are going on? I am aware of the complexity with which many noble Lords have wrestled in recent debates, and that might be a useful way forward.

[Lord Freud]

Universal credit is a wide-ranging transformation of the welfare system, so it is difficult to pick isolated elements. It is now rolling out rapidly. At the same time, we are building a support network incorporating, among other things, universal support delivered locally. One of the key factors is that it delivers a gross value to this society of £7 billion every year. One reason it does that is that it directs its support far more efficiently at the people who need it most. The other thing it does is to make sure that it is always worth working and it is always worth working more. Finally, I try to keep the House up to date with universal credit developments because it is a really important transformation. I commit again to do that. I would like to find a way to do that in the Chamber, as I did a couple of months ago.

Benefits: Sanctions

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Sherlock]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to review the operation of sanctions on benefits.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)]

We have made a number of improvements to the sanctions systems and are implementing further changes following recommendations made by the Oakley review. We are now focusing on embedding those changes and improvements. We will keep the operation of the sanctions system under review to ensure that it continues to function effectively and fairly.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I wonder if the Minister has read the leaflet that his department published for disabled people, which featured Zac and Sarah. Sarah had been sanctioned for failing to produce a CV, but it ended happily. Sarah said:

“My benefit is back to normal now and I’m really pleased with how my CV looks. It’s going to help me when I’m ready to go back to work”.

An FOI request established that Sarah does not exist. The picture was a model and DWP invented the quotes. Real people’s experience of sanctions is very different. Food banks repeatedly see desperate people sanctioned for trivial or, frankly, mystifying reasons, and the scale of sanctions is now such that a fifth—no, almost a quarter—of all JSA claimants were sanctioned in the last five years. Will the Minister please now do what the DWP Select Committee asked: respond to its report and conduct a major review of sanctions before the whole system is discredited?

[Lord Freud]

Let me clarify this. The sanctions level runs at around 5% on a monthly basis. That level is the running rate of sanctions and other figures are simply wrong. On the first point that the noble Baroness made, we do use illustrative examples where they are real, and we make it clear where they are not. In this case, it was wrong—and we have said it was wrong—to have made illustrative examples look as if they were real.

Universal Credit (Waiting Days) (Amendment) Regulations 2015

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Monday 13th July 2015 Lords Chamber

In conclusion, your Lordships’ House can send a strong signal to the Government tonight that it expects this waiting-period policy to be changed because it will force people to use food banks, because it will push people towards payday lenders and because it will put people into rent arrears and into a cycle of debt. I beg to move.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord German, for moving his Motion and for explaining to the House the effects of this measure. I will not detain the House by repeating that explanation. I also understand his desire to mitigate some of the effects of these provisions by seeking to exclude the housing element of universal credit from the regulations, but I think that there is a better way to approach this so I have taken a different direction in my Motion and I will explain why I think the House should agree. I am also being ever-optimistic, hoping that the noble Lord, Lord Freud, will find this a more persuasive case and that by the end he will rise up and cheer in agreement and obviate the need for a vote at all. I shall do my best.

The starting point for Labour is that we support universal credit. We think it is a good idea. Bringing together separate working-age benefits can potentially make the system simpler and should make it easier to work out whether and by how much you would be better off in work. But because we support it, we want it to work, and we understand that to work it needs to get off to the best possible start. Sadly, that has not happened.

When the Welfare Reform Act was going through Parliament, noble Lords from across the House, from all Benches, pointed out to the Government at different stages some of the risks inherent in the approach they were taking and made various suggestions for how the Bill could be improved. Sadly—as we all think—had these been listened to, we might not be in the position we are in now; none the less, things are not looking brilliant. Unfortunately, once the legislation was in, things did not improve. Delivery has been disastrous from the outset, starting with an implementation plan which the Opposition pointed out to Ministers right at the beginning was hopelessly overoptimistic.

The July 2010 Green Paper on universal credit even included the claim that the IT changes necessary to deliver it,

“would not constitute a major IT project”.

In retrospect, the naivety of Ministers in signing off the plan is extraordinary. Since 2011, £130 million of taxpayers’ money has been written off because of failed universal credit IT. The Government still have not published any of the details of how they are going to spend this £12.8 billion budget, having repeatedly claimed that universal credit was on time and on budget when patently it was neither.

What of the impact on claimants? In November 2011, Ministers announced that 1 million people would be claiming universal credit by April 2014 and the project would be fully rolled out to 7 million people within six years, by 2017. But now there are only 65,380 people claiming universal credit and full rollout is still some way off. It is in this context that these regulations have been laid.

The noble Lord, Lord German, cited the damning report from the Government’s Social Security Advisory Committee, as well as the concerns expressed by our own Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. As he explained, the provisions will extend the waiting time to seven days. They are already in place for jobseeker’s allowance and employment and support allowance but those are normally paid fortnightly and, as the noble Lord, Lord German, explained, the universal credit system is paid monthly and people could find themselves waiting six weeks for money, and at that point getting an amount of money equivalent to only a month minus seven days’ allowance.

When the Social Security Advisory Committee looked at the regulations and recommended, unusually, that they should not be made, the Government’s only response was that they did not accept the SSAC’s recommendation because the risks were outweighed by the benefits that could accrue from reinvesting the savings in measures to help claimants get into work. When the scrutiny committee pressed them on this and said in that case could they explain how they were going to spend this money, all the Government would say was that during 2015-16 they would commit only to spend the money in this way but they would not give any plans for subsequent years or any detail about how the money might be spent. Since that appeared to be the Government’s only defence to the SSAC’s report, it is, frankly, unreasonable for them not to have offered more information when asked to do so by the scrutiny committee.

Can the Minister give the House the kind of detailed breakdown of costs and savings that he was specifically asked for by the scrutiny committee—repeatedly—and which he simply failed to give? The change is described as a “save to spend” measure, which will save £150 million a year once universal credit has been rolled out. The savings will fund measures to get people off benefit and into work. Those savings are predicated on the full rollout to 7 million people. We have 65,000 people so £150 million does not seem a reasonable assumption for the savings at the moment. Will the Minister please tell us? If the figure is proportionate, the back of my envelope suggests that it would cost £1.4 million. I presume it is not proportionate but I invite the Minister therefore to give us an up-to-date estimate of savings in this and the next financial year. The scrutiny committee asked for this but he simply failed to do it.

The only other bit of financial information I could glean was in the Budget costings, which said that the Government would have to spend an extra £5 million if the start of these regulations was delayed by a month. Is that a good way to extrapolate the cost and, if so, will the Minister explain it to us? As the noble Lord, Lord German, pointed out, the Social Security Advisory Committee said that the DWP should give claimants more information about how to get an advance. The Government said they would look at that in the digital process, where nothing is mentioned, so will the Minister tell us what is going on?

Universal Credit (Waiting Days) (Amendment) Regulations 2015

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Monday 13th July 2015 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Sherlock]

That this House calls on Her Majesty’s Government, in the light of the Social Security Advisory Committee’s Report of June 2015, to delay the enactment of the Universal Credit (Waiting Days) (Amendment) Regulations 2015 until Universal Credit is fully rolled out (SI 2015/1362).

Relevant document: 3rd Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, in the absence of suitable reassurances from the Minister, I wish to test the opinion of the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Sherlock]

Before we move on to the next business, and in the light of that result, will the Minister make a statement on how the Government propose to handle this issue?

Child Poverty

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

The number of children in workless households has been coming down rapidly. It has come down by 390,000 and is now at a record low. We are looking to encourage more families back into the workplace through the financial incentives around universal credit, the new national living wage—clearly, a very direct incentive—and free childcare, and we are working to boost the number of apprenticeships from 2 million under the last Government to 3 million under this one.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, the devil for today clearly is in the detail. It is working parents who depend most on tax credits to make work pay and lift their children out of poverty but, while a single parent with two children who is working 16 hours a week will gain £400 from the new national minimum wage, which is very welcome, sadly she will lose more than twice as much in cuts to tax credits. How can this be right? How can the Minister tell the House that working families are better off when it is those very elements of tax credits and universal credit which make work pay that have been cut today? How can that be the security for families of which the Chancellor boasts?

Universal Credit

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Tuesday 7th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, it is a bad day to answer that question. The real point is that as we move from the combination of the benefit and tax credit systems into one universal credit system, the incentives will be restructured to encourage people to work their way down the taper.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for wanting to update us—in fact, he sent me a lovely letter last week telling me how well universal credit was going—but the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, was that we were expecting 1 million people to be on it by last year. In fact, in two years’ time there should be 7 million people on it. So if the Minister wants to update us, given that there are currently just 65,000 people getting universal credit, will he not follow the advice of the National Audit Office and tackle the secrecy surrounding the programme? In particular, will he agree to publish the full business case for universal credit and a proper plan with milestones, so that we can judge it and reassure people how their money has been spent and when universal credit will be rolled out? He will know that his good friend the Prime Minister has said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Is it not time to throw open the windows of DWP and let some light in?

[Lord Freud]

We have completed the strategic outline business case and will be doing the outline business case this summer. We have actually put out quite a lot of figures, in particular on the amount that this programme is costing, which is down from the original £2.4 billion to £1.8 billion. The letter which I sent to the noble Baroness and various others, and which is available in the Library, tries to deal with the main changes going on in this programme. It reflects my determination that this House will be kept informed of developments as they come up. I have made a commitment to do that and I will do that.

European Union (Approvals) Bill [HL]

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Monday 6th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for explaining the measures in some depth and with the kind of enthusiasm which they frankly merit. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, for raising the question of process.

I read the Bill and the Explanatory Notes and, indeed, the report of the House of Commons scrutiny committee quite carefully, and that is half an hour of my life that I am not getting back. By the end of it, I was still not much clearer as to what it was that was of such import in these measures that primary legislation should be required—a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford. Can the Minister enlighten the House? I fully accept that this is not my area of expertise—I do work and pensions. Are there any far-reaching consequences flowing from the draft decision on the participation of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia as an observer in the work of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights? Does that in any way have an impact on any possible timeline for an application from Macedonia for future membership of the EU? Are there any other consequences which are not immediately apparent from the documentation?

I wonder if I can help the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, on the draft decision in relation to the tripartite social summit. Initially, the former Minister of State for Employment, Esther McVey, seemed to take a similar view. She initially questioned the legal basis on which this was brought forward. The House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee reported the Minister as saying that the Government would,

“ask the Commission more fully to substantiate its reasons”,

for proposing Article 352 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union as the legal basis for the draft decision. Further, because an Article 352 measure is subject to the requirements of Section 8 of the European Union Act 2011, a further assessment would then be needed by the Government to determine whether one or more of the exempt purposes set out in Section 8(6) of the 2011 Act would apply, as the Minister knows.

The committee asked the Minister to explain her reservations and whether she considered that there was any other legal basis on which this could have been brought forward. The committee said that it could not see that any of the statutory exemptions would apply in this case and asked the Minister to let it know what the basis was for her reservations. The Minister came back and confirmed, basically, that the Commission had taken the view that it had to bring it forward under Article 352 because there was no other suitable legal basis. She then explained the Commission’s reasoning for it. So we never really got to find out the Minister’s reservations in the first place. Could the Minister perhaps tell us whether there was any alternative to doing this? If not, the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, is a good one. Are we going to see a succession of minor measures coming through, all of which will require primary legislation?

I feel rather strongly about this matter, as I work in pensions often with the noble Lord, Lord Freud, and I have stood in the Moses Room scrutinising repeatedly the entire detail of universal credit, which is a reform of all working-age benefits, done in secondary legislation that this House cannot amend and on which scrutiny is limited. The Childcare Bill is going through this House at the moment, and most of the detail will be in secondary legislation. Yet we are assembled in all our grandeur here to look at the detail of what seem on the face of it, to my inexpert eyes, to be rather minor measures. I am quite sure that I have misunderstood it, and I very much look forward to the Minister’s explanation.