Alcohol: Pricing

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Monday 29th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I can reassure the noble Lord that the consultation is very much aware of that issue.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, is it true that more over-65s are admitted to hospital with alcohol-related problems than 18 to 25 year-olds? If so, what are the Government doing about this?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

My Lords, that was one of the assertions in the programme—that the number had indeed increased—and it is a matter of concern. Although we have amused ourselves with this issue to some degree, there is a serious context in which we are discussing it.

Claims Management Companies

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Tuesday 29th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Kennedy of Southwark for securing this debate. I also congratulate him on his sustained interest in this subject and on pushing it; I am pleased that he has done so. I declare an interest as a non-executive director of the Financial Ombudsman Service.

Like other noble Lords, I have had the experience of being chased by claims management companies. Indeed, it is something which is raised almost every time I have a conversation with anybody in which financial services comes up. Most people express particular irritation about the marketing practices of claims management companies. There cannot be many people left in this country who have yet to have either a phone call or a message promising thousands of pounds for an accident they do not remember having or for a loan they do not remember taking out. However, in some circumstances it can be more than an irritation; these messages can create false hope for people who are struggling financially, at whom they are very often targeted. That is more than an irritation.

Concerns are expressed on all sides about this problem. Consumer groups are worried about the fact that individuals are paying significant sums to claims management companies for getting redress, when they could simply go directly to businesses and, if necessary, use the free ombudsman service. In turn, businesses are complaining that the costs of dealing with CMCs, especially if the claims are speculative or unfounded, are significant and can disrupt their attempts to resolve complaints.

However, there is always a question to be asked as to why claims management companies target a particular market. They do so because an opportunity has arisen. We need to remember that CMCs are flourishing in the financial services industry because of the widespread mis-selling of payment protection insurance by the banks over a long period. That mis-selling created consumer detriment on a significant scale. Provisioning is now up to some £9 billion in the banks. The failure of the banks to maintain the trust of consumers by handling complaints well, on the back of that, has created the opportunity into which claims management companies have stepped.

To give a sense of the scale of the problem, I asked the ombudsman service for some figures. It is now seeing record numbers of PPI complaints; 1,000 new complaints every day. It is finding in favour of consumers three times out of four. Some 60% of all the complaints received by the ombudsman last year were about PPI; more than 150,000 complaints.

In relation to the points made by both of the previous speakers, last year the ombudsman service dismissed more than 5,000 cases because there had not even been a PPI policy sold in the first place. Most of those claims were brought by claims management companies.

I understand that the proportion of cases coming through CMCs has fallen; it is hoped that consumer awareness is improving. But there is more to do. My noble friend Lord Kennedy gave a very good, clear description of the level of breach that is going on, and suggested some remedies. However, the picture is complicated, as he would understand. Some CMCs conduct their business in a perfectly responsible way; no doubt, they obtain redress for consumers who otherwise might not have known that they were owed money or know how to go about claiming it. Consumers should be entitled to make a choice to be represented, provided that they do so with sufficient information and understanding as to what they are getting into and a genuine understanding as to what the alternatives are.

What needs to be done? I offer the Minister three thoughts to take away. First, the Government need to act to encourage businesses and regulators to address the detriment in the first place. That way consumers can be involved in the process of securing redress and take away the opportunity for CMCs in the first place. Secondly, the Government need to focus on delivering effective regulation of CMCs so as to allow responsible CMCs to offer a service but discourage the others out of the market altogether. Effective regulation would need to tackle the kind of marketing practices described by my noble friend Lord Kennedy and the noble Baroness, Lady Scott. But we also need to make it clear that transparency on charging right at the very front of the process and enforcing rules on cold calling were there, so the consumer genuinely understands the costs.

Finally, I very much agree with my noble friend Lord Kennedy that the ideal opportunity has come to put in place an arrangement for dealing with complaints about CMCs by giving effect to the provisions that would pass responsibility to the Legal Services Ombudsman. I will be very interested in the Minister’s response to those points, as the time has come to do something about this problem. I hope that the Government can be encouraged to act now.

Asylum Seekers: Children

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I am aware of the report from the Children’s Society, and my honourable friend Damian Green and officials have met the society to discuss it. The noble Baroness asked for an explanation of the disparity between income support levels and the rates of support that we offer asylum seekers. The simple reason is that asylum seekers get all their accommodation and utility bills paid, and therefore it is not necessary to pay their support at 100%. The noble Baroness will also be aware—I think this is important—of how this disparity occurred. Until 2008 asylum rates were set at 70% of income support, and a decision was then taken by the Government of the time—who, as the noble Baroness will be aware, happened to be a Labour Government—to break that link. Since then, the levels have been set annually each year in accordance with what has been felt to be appropriate.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I think that the Minister may have slightly misheard my noble friend Lady Lister. She asked specifically whether the Government can tell us whether they are satisfied that they are meeting their human rights obligations. Perhaps I may ask the Minister a simpler question. Have the Government made any formal assessment of whether the levels of support they supply under Section 55 of the Act meet the requirements of that section? In other words, have they done an assessment and can they be satisfied that children’s health and well-being are being protected?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, we are obliged to look at those matters each year and we do so. We do not believe that the levels of support should be at 100% of income support because we are paying for other things, such as rent, rates and utility bills, which amount to a very large proportion of what would otherwise be accounted for in income support. We are satisfied that the rates are right and we are continuing to look at them. I repeat that the link in rates, which was originally set at 70% of income support, was broken by the party opposite when it was in government. It can explain that if it wishes.

Immigration: Detention of Children at Heathrow

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, the IMB’s report makes it clear that it thinks the officials dealing with these matters are doing so in a professional manner. What it was complaining about was the actual facilities in which these people were kept for up to 24 hours at the maximum. If people with children are going to be kept longer, at Heathrow there are other facilities such as Tinsley House that can be used and where those children can be sent with their parents. The idea that the children should be sent off somewhere else, therefore bringing in social services, would create even greater problems and trauma for the children. It is far better that they should stay with their parents for what we hope will be a relatively short amount of time while a decision is being made on whether they can stay in the country or not; and, after that, while they wait for a plane to take them back to where they came from.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, will the Minister clarify the Government’s position as regards the board’s report? The BBC website said that the UK Border Agency had reported that it had raised the issue with BAA on numerous occasions in the past and would continue to do so. However, the BBC website says that a BAA spokeswoman said that BAA was,

“somewhat surprised by UK Border Force's response, since we have had many meetings with them recently and it has not been raised”.

Who is correct?

[Lord Henley]

All I know is that the UK Border Agency and BAA have had considerable discussions about these matters over the years. Obviously I cannot give evidence about the precise detail of those discussions, but we know that they are aware of the problems because we have also discussed the matter with BAA. The important point to remember is that we will do what we can to improve things. We have only just received this report, which came in two days ago. We will be responding to it within the appropriate period of six weeks. We know that things are not entirely satisfactory but we are talking about holding people only in the very short term while a decision is made. We hope that that will not be longer than 24 hours. If it is, as I made clear, we have other facilities, such as Tinsley House, available.

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I want to focus on what was not in the gracious Speech and should have been. That is probably what is known technically as a target-rich environment, but I have had to narrow down my remarks for the purpose of the seven-minute time guideline. I want to focus today on children and families.

I spent seven months recently sitting on the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, something which anyone who has spoken to me for more than five seconds in the past six months will know all too much about. We produced our final report at the end of March and I commend it to the House. There will, I hope, be a Question for Short Debate on it soon, so I shall not dwell on the generalities. However, I shall focus on something which may be particularly relevant today.

I was struck by one set of statistics produced by the panel, showing that about a quarter of the convicted rioters were under 18 and that about three-quarters were under 25. Forty-six per cent of the under-18s were living in poverty; 66% had special educational needs; and 30% were persistently absent from school. These were young people who had already had challenges, so what happened in the riots was not simply happening to a random selection of our young people.

Many people and agencies were responsible for that, which the report goes into in detail. We found that too many families were not getting the support that they needed to raise children. In the wake of the riots, people were very quick to blame parents. Everywhere we went, we asked communities who was responsible. They identified a range of people, with parents always coming high up in the list. However, when we talked to parents, they would often say that they could not get the help that they needed. One worker described very movingly working with a woman who had had terrible problems with her children. She had said, “You know, people keep telling me I need to sort things out, but nobody tells me how. Please will somebody help me to do that?”. A lot of money is already going into working with vulnerable families with children, but there is a real question as to whether it is going to the right place and doing the right things.

The Government have their 120,000 problem families, and I commend that work, but that is essentially crisis intervention. It is going to help a very small number of people who have a significant need which has already manifested itself. That still leaves a significant problem. We estimated that at least half a million forgotten families are bumping along the bottom. They never quite hit the now very high threshold required to get them the help they need to get off it. That is a problem. We asked the Government to look afresh at how they direct support to vulnerable families. I ask the Minister to think about that today.

We set out a few principles. I will highlight a couple of them. First and most obvious, that kind of intervention needs to be evidence based. Where there is evidence that it works, such as the Family Nurse Partnership Programme in which the Government have invested, it should be rolled out quickly and not simply focus on small numbers of people. Secondly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, pointed out so well, interventions need to be timely. Ideally, the issues should be pre-empted or identified and dealt with as soon as possible to stop them becoming acute. The costs of not doing that are enormous and yet we consistently fail to do it. I know that money is tight, but that is true in the health service and we do not simply say, “Sorry, we will not do vaccination programmes this year because they are quite expensive”. We recognise that the costs of not doing that are significant, even if some of the people vaccinated may not have got mumps anyway. None the less, we invest the money in it. Yet, we systematically fail to learn that in other forms of intervention.

Thirdly, there needs to be a whole-family view. Too often, we came across cases where no individual member of the family quite hit the threshold for getting help yet taken as a whole the family was, frankly, dysfunctional. That is a real problem in the way that the different bits of the state which engage with families are either not joining up or are not meeting at the point where the family has a problem. They experience the problems as a family, not in separate units. Trying to get the state’s support to address that would be helpful.

I offer the Government a couple of thoughts for their children and families Bill. First, could they use the Bill to give a clear pledge to identify children with problems early? The noble Lord, Lord Hill, is in his place. Would he consider giving schools a clear responsibility for identifying children who are vulnerable for a range of reasons? The child may be a young carer, have special needs or face parental neglect or abuse. There should be a specific responsibility to identify that and resources to help bring together the people needed to address those problems before they get any worse. Secondly, could the Government show the way forward in early intervention by leading by example and extending the Family Nurse Partnership Programme to all teenage mothers at once? That would not be a huge sum of money and would show that, where a programme is effective and evaluated as such, the Government are willing to put the money behind it.

Intervention for vulnerable families is one of those happy issues on which the heart and the head come together. We all know the evidence of the head. The evidence of Graham Allen MP is the most recent example of the money saved by early intervention. The human case is also overpowering. Over the last few months, I have met too many young people whose futures look very bleak at a frankly depressingly early age. I have gone into prisons, young offender institutions and communities where I have met young people. If they were your own children, you would cry that things had come to this point for them so early. Yet so often, things could have been spotted sooner. As a country, if we come across those people it is incredibly sad to think of the lives wasted and the contribution that they could have made. What is really heart-breaking is to think that we had a chance to stop it and did not. I hope that the Government will look at this.

Public Disorder: Compensation

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, my noble friend has asked quite a number of questions. Although I can assure him that we have urged the police authorities to ensure that compensation is paid as swiftly as possible to all those who are entitled, we want to make sure that it is paid only to those who are entitled. He is right to address the point that the 1886 Act—which, obviously, was passed some time ago—does not cover business interruption. That is why we think that there should be a review of the Act, and we will consider all options in due course. As I stressed earlier, we believe that some 90 per cent of those who suffered, whether businesses or otherwise, had insurance, and as likely as not that insurance would have included business interruption. The 1886 Act comes from another era when these matters were not considered. As for the planning point, I will take that on board and consult colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel. The Minister has just told the House that 90 per cent of individuals making claims to insurance companies have been paid, and the Association of British Insurers has a similar figure—85 per cent—for small businesses, and yet only half of those claiming under the RDA have been paid. Can the Minister account for the difference? Does he think there is any truth in the rumour that the reason there is such a big difference is that police authorities are setting such a high standard for the evidential basis and the paperwork, which is way in excess of that required by commercial insurance companies? Does he think that that is causing the delay?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, the noble Baroness makes a valid point, and I pay tribute to the work that she did earlier on these matters. However, it is also important to look at the fact that those who were not insured were the sort of people who probably did not have adequate records about what they had in their shops—and I am thinking particularly of shops—and one therefore needs to conduct the loss-adjustment process very carefully. As she will know, people often make what one might describe as overgenerous claims when they do not have the appropriate records of what they had in their particular shop or business, and those things need to be looked at carefully. However, as I made clear in my response to my noble friend, it is important that we make sure that the police deal with these matters as quickly as possible. That is what we have been urging them to do and that is why we have set in motion a number of measures to speed up the process.

Public Disorder: Uninsured Claimants

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Monday 19th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I accept what my noble friend says, that things have not been as speedy as they should have been. We estimate that some 5,000 claims have been received, totalling in excess of £250 million, but we must remember that a lot of those claims will include claims for loss that are not covered by the Act. We have to ensure that we do not pay out for things that the Government are not responsible for. We will try to deal with—as the noble Lord implied in his original Question—the uninsured claimants first of all, but obviously we want to deal with the insured claimants as well. That is why I stress that we are working with both the police authorities and the insurance companies to ensure that that is the case.

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I am grateful to hear that the Minister has offered a figure. I put down a Written Question to ask him how many payments had been made under the Riot (Damages) Act, and the Answer was three sentences long. It told me that applications for compensation were made directly to police authorities, and:

“There is no requirement for them to provide this information to the Home Office. Therefore, the precise figures of payments that have already been made to claimants will be held locally by each police authority”.—[Official Report, 8/12/11; col. WA198.]

In other words, go and ask them. Does the Minister accept that the Government in fact bear responsibility for sorting this problem out? If so, will he be willing to report to the House what progress is being made?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I gave an estimate of the number of claims but I cannot give an absolute figure. That is why I stress that it is only an estimate that 5,000 have been made. One has to accept that a lot of those claims will not be valid; in certain areas there have been many more claims than one would expect. I make no further comment on that.

I will certainly keep the House fully informed about how we are getting on with these matters. We want to ensure that all claims are settled as quickly and fairly as possible, and that when we are dealing with public money it is handed out in the appropriate manner.

Riots Communities and Victims Panel

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that comment in particular. As a member of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, I had the privilege of meeting a great number of people and was very moved and shocked by stories of loss and trauma, so I welcome the fact that the Government will look at the Act.

Two things were raised most often with us. First, we did not meet a single person who had received a payout under the Riot (Damages) Act. Has anyone had such a payment and, if not, will the Government move to overhaul the Act in some detail? Secondly, there was a sense that people in areas hit by riots felt that they had been abandoned by the police. I met some hugely brave police and PCSOs who had gone out there and risked their lives. Will the Minister comment on what the Government will do in response to make sure that police tactics are appropriate for the kind of disorder we now see? That means smart policing, not just tough policing.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on her contribution to this report as one of the four members of the panel. We are very grateful to her for all her work. We will review the Riot (Damages) Act. It is a fairly ancient bit of legislation and obviously needs looking at. We will also review police tactics and how they worked and we will look at the reports from the Met and other police authorities. We should also look at the areas where we had no riots because there are possibly lessons to be learnt from why there were riots in some places and not in others. There will be a great deal to consider and no doubt the noble Baroness and her panel will produce yet more for us as this was only an interim report. I look forward to that, and the Government will respond in due course.