Welfare Reform Bill

Baroness Hussein-Ece Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey]

My Lords, I thank the noble Countess for the intervention, but because of the grouping I had thought that this was like a Second Reading and I am trying to address the issue of housing—the subject of the amendment. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Newton, that the grouping is unfortunate.

The point that I am trying to get to is: it will not be possible to change the welfare system without upsetting some group or other in our community. I therefore believe that if we put the amendment in the Bill, the Minister and the Government, including their successors, will be hidebound by it. However, the Minister has also heard the widespread view in the House that we are confronted with an area of concern, particularly when children are likely to be moved from their homes, lose their schools and all that goes with that. Secondary legislation is the right place in which to put this issue but, if we believe we can go through a process of changing the welfare system and not affect a particular group in the community, we are misleading it as well as ourselves.

[Baroness Hussein-Ece]

My Lords, I also came to the Chamber intending not to speak but to listen carefully to the arguments. I feel moved to speak because of my personal experience as a local councillor in inner city areas such as Islington and Hackney, where homelessness and poverty have gone hand in hand and where over several decades we have seen the decline of affordable housing that ordinary families can rent. The two previous Governments have to take responsibility for not building enough affordable housing. That is the fact of the matter and the elephant in the room that is not being addressed.

It therefore pains me when I hear people around this Chamber, whom I respect, saying, for example, that families are moving to upmarket areas such as Hampstead in order to live in a better area. I have never seen evidence of that. When families through no fault of their own lose their home, which might be because it has been repossessed or they have been unable to keep up with the mortgage payments, they naturally present themselves to the local authority. The local authority has to take a view in making an assessment of such families and, if the family is not dysfunctional enough, if the children or either parent do not have enough of a disability or they do not have enough points—because it is all done on a points system—there is not much that the local authority can do. Very often, those families or individuals are directed to the private sector. Local homelessness departments will usually give them a list of estate agents where they can go to find somewhere. Often, families who have lost their homes will end up in the private sector. The private sector has filled the gap, certainly where I come from in Islington, between the unaffordable private homes and social housing. It has taken up the slack there. Of course, prices have shot up because of demand. That is not the fault of people who have become unintentionally homeless.

I hear my noble friend saying that 76 per cent of the public support a cap. I do not think that anyone in your Lordships' House would disagree that there should be some form of cap and that it should not be an open-ended provision. It is the implementation, how this will work, that is worrying many of us here. We should not force out families from areas such as mine. People often think that Islington is a very rich area full of wealthy people, which it is, but it has the third-highest level of child poverty. We have the extremes: very rich people and very poor people. The very rich live in the houses that have become increasingly unaffordable for most people, and the rest live in social housing, apart from some in the middle who live in private accommodation. I want to live in a mixed community. I do not want to live in a Paris-style ghetto. I do not want ghettos such as in Paris, where the poorer families have been forced into the doughnut outside the city. We should support mixed communities. We want our children to have a healthy outlook and mix with people from all different backgrounds.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

I apologise for interrupting my noble friend, but I think that she is trespassing again on a Second Reading speech, and I invite her to bring her comments to a conclusion.

[Baroness Hussein-Ece]

I apologise. Although we have heard the assurances that there will be transitional arrangements, I have not yet heard what those protections will be for the families who will be most affected.

[Lord German]

My Lords, I start by making it clear that the concerns that have been expressed from these Benches are not around there being a cap. It is essential that there should be a cap; people find it manifestly unfair that claimants can receive in benefits more than the average working family gets in wages. The concerns expressed within the amendment are about two crucial issues: homelessness and housing; and the vulnerability of children. We are looking for discussion and reassurances from my noble friend the Minister on the issues raised by the cap. Our concern is about how those policies will be ameliorated—how to find a cap that fits.

I remind my noble friend the Minister that in Committee he said:

“The Government are looking at ways of easing the transition for families and providing assistance in hard cases. We recognise that there are households for which it would be inappropriate to restrict the amount of benefit that they can receive”.—[Official Report, 21/11/11; col. GC 346.]

The Government have already announced in another place and here that transition arrangements are to be made. This is the opportunity for my noble friend to express the Government’s views on those two crucial issues contained in the amendment. These details should emerge at this stage because it is appropriate that people know the Government’s direction of travel. It is not simply a question of us accepting that you need flexibility for the future. I understand that the Government’s regulations will follow from these debates, that there will be affirmative resolutions and that the House will have the opportunity to hear and vote on the detail. We need reassurances now in the broadest terms about the issues raised in the amendment.

I appreciate that by DWP standards—the noble Lord, Lord Fowler has said this already—the numbers captured by this policy are small. However, they are small only in respect of the DWP’s overall workload, not in terms of the 67,000 families or the 220,000 children who will be affected. We cannot put aside the fact that there is personal impact.

First, I turn to the issue of homelessness. I understand—we heard it this morning in a broadcast by the Secretary of State, and it has also been referred to in this debate—that the numbers of potential reported homeless households is based not on rooflessness but on the structure of how this is measured by the Department for Communities and Local Government. I wonder what reassurance my noble friend can give that we will not find families out on the street, that we will find homes for people and that they will be accommodated. If the numbers who are classed as homeless are those who are sharing rooms, which I heard from the Secretary of State, what methodologies and transition arrangements are being put in place? After all, if people are entitled to be classed as homeless by virtue of that definition, and are sharing a room, what is to prevent them presenting themselves to a local authority as homeless, thereby generating further cost to the public purse and creating no savings whatever? What transition arrangements will be put in place to ensure—what this House is asking for—that no one should be made roofless as a result of this policy. Any savings if they were to come by having to throw the balance to another department might be illusory. I am seeking reassurance from my noble friend the Minister. We want to hear the outline of the arrangements to be put in place to ensure that we do not sustain expenditure by simply passing costs from one department to another.

We are told that the department now has extensive information on the households that will be affected by the cap. I seek reassurance that there will always be a property available—not necessarily close to the same street in which the people have lived—for the people who will be displaced and that they will always have somewhere to live. Crucially, what help will be provided in the transitional period between now and April 2013 and perhaps, beyond, given the Minister’s comments in Committee. I also ask him to outline the processes to be put in place during this transition period and to provide the reassurances needed to demonstrate that rooflessness and overcrowding are not options that the Government are considering.

A second issue, which we will come back to in another debate, is that of children. This issue is mentioned in this amendment and has been raised before. It is indeed a powerful statement that children are not responsible for the decisions of their parents, but in workless households the worst disincentive is not to aspire to work. Those of us with experience representing the poorest areas—in my case, the poorest area—within our country know that it is a dreadful stigma which we place upon our young people. I wonder whether the Minister can provide some reassurance and tell us what arrangements he is making. What support will be given to the longer term aspirations towards work for our younger people? Alongside this is the impact of a parent becoming unemployed without suitable transition arrangements.

Perhaps all these issues need to be outlined in principle now, so that my noble friends on these Benches and noble colleagues around this Chamber can decide whether the Government are keen to ensure that the impacts are going to be ameliorated by this cap.