Asked by: Lord Ouseley (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have, if any, to review the operation of the benefits system, in particular its impact on vulnerable people.
Answered by Baroness Buscombe
The government keeps the delivery of benefits under constant review, which includes consideration of how benefits are delivered to vulnerable groups.
Asked by: Lord Ouseley (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they plan to take to improve the quality of life and future prospects for the four million children living in relative poverty in the UK.
Answered by Baroness Buscombe
This Government is committed to action that will make a lasting difference to the lives of disadvantaged children. This requires an approach that goes beyond the safety net of the welfare state to tackle the root causes of child poverty and disadvantage. Work is key to alleviating poverty; children in workless households are five times more likely to be in poverty than those in households where all adults were working. This Government’s policies to support and encourage work mean that there are 608,000 fewer children in workless households compared with 2010. Improving Lives: Helping Workless Families, published on 4 April, set out a framework for a continued focus on improving children’s outcomes, now and in the future.
Asked by: Lord Ouseley (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to simplify the benefits regime to reduce the extent of the form filling and assessment burdens on benefits recipients.
Answered by Baroness Buscombe
The DWP is currently implementing Universal Credit. This flagship welfare reform policy simplifies the benefits regime for working-age people. It replaces 6 former benefits administered by DWP, HMRC and Local Authorities, with 1 single application process to DWP. Universal Credit also makes extensive use of digital services to reduce the extent of form filling for benefit recipients, who can interact with the Department using an online account.
The introduction of the New State Pension on 6 April 2016 also provided a simpler and more straightforward benefit for pension-age customers. This is less open to misunderstanding and dispute. State Pension claims are supported by an, increasingly popular, online claims service alongside a well established telephony channel. These two channels account for the vast majority of claims and have significantly reduced form filling. DWP is currently testing a new claims portal for State Pension to further improve the citizen experience.
Asked by: Lord Ouseley (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of the freeze on housing benefit rates, combined with an extended benefit cap and rising rents, on homeless families, and especially children, in particular in cases where local authorities have to place families in temporary housing far away from their local areas.
Answered by Lord Freud
The Government routinely publishes cumulative analysis of the impacts of its tax, welfare and public spending policies on households. The most recent assessment was published at Budget 2016 and is available on gov.uk. Nevertheless, such static analysis is limited in that it cannot robustly capture the behavioural changes encouraged by these policies. Considering welfare measures in isolation, such as Housing Benefit changes, would fail to recognise the impacts of tax and spending decisions such as the increase to the personal allowance and the provision of early years’ childcare, which are benefitting families up and down the country.
Asked by: Lord Ouseley (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the effectiveness of policies and programmes aimed at tackling poverty, in the light of the study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, <i>Destitution in the UK</i>, which found that over a million people were destitute at some point in 2015.
Answered by Lord Freud
This Government has introduced a wide range of policies and programmes to transform lives, from the flagship reform of Universal Credit to the Troubled Families Programme and the Pupil Premium. The majority of these programmes are audited
We know that work is the best route out of poverty. Evidence shows that almost three-quarters of poor workless families who found full employment escaped poverty; and that the highest poverty exit rate of 75% was for children living in families that moved from part to full employment.
That is why this Government is committed to policies that provide people with the support they need at all stages to get into work, increase their earnings, and keeping more of what they earn.