Under-occupancy Penalty

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

No.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

When the Government consulted on the bedroom tax in the run-up to the introduction of the Welfare Reform Act 2012, how many disability and carers’ organisations and others warned the Department categorically of the discriminatory nature of the measure, and why was their advice ignored at such substantial cost to the taxpayer?

[Justin Tomlinson]

In the development of this policy there was full and wide consultation.

In-work Poverty

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Carolyn Harris]

I do, and not only Wales is affected; this affects every constituency in the country.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

Would it surprise my hon. Friend to hear that, under universal credit plans, some 116,000 disabled people who are in work—and therefore doing the right thing, according to the Government’s narrative—will be £40 a week worse off under the Government’s proposal?

[Carolyn Harris]

That is a shocking indictment of the low consideration the Government have for people in need. For example, a lone parent working full time on the minimum wage who receives no support for their housing costs will experience a reduction of £2,600 a year—that is £50 a week. Nobody can afford to lose £50 a week.

The combined effect of income tax, national insurance and the universal credit taper will mean that universal credit claimants who pay income tax will keep only 24% of any increase in their earnings. They will have to increase their earnings by £210 a week—or, to put it in percentage terms, 72%—to make up the income loss they will face as a result of the reduction in support.

[Carolyn Harris]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, and I agree. That is a reality people face every day, and it can only get worse.

The short-term effect for current claimants of universal credit is that they face huge losses to income come April 2016. There are currently 155,000 recipients of universal credit, and the number is increasing every week, with an aim of there being 500,000 recipients by April this year.

During Work and Pensions questions recently, the Secretary of State claimed that the flexible support fund will act as transitional protection for current claimants and said that

“those who are on universal credit at present will be fully supported through the flexible support fund, which will provide all the resources necessary to ensure that their situation remains exactly the same as it is today.”—[Official Report, 7 December 2015; Vol. 603, c. 688.]

However, that existing fund is used for a different purpose. Its budget last year was £69 million, but the Office for Budget Responsibility estimates cuts to working families of £100 million next year, rising every year until they reach £3.2 billion in 2020.

[Neil Coyle]

I apologise for not thanking my hon. Friend for securing the debate in my previous intervention or saying what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. The Secretary of State was referring to the number of people currently receiving universal credit who will be protected by some measure, but is that not a little disingenuous given that the Government are about 1,000 years behind schedule on delivering universal credit? They had expected some 2 million people to be on it by now. Should the Government not be a bit more embarrassed about mentioning the small number who are already receiving universal credit?

--- Later in debate ---

[Gerald Jones]

I could not agree more. Both the Welsh Government and local government have tried to mitigate those circumstances, but the major levers lie here at Westminster.

[Neil Coyle]

May I add a London voice? Specific costs include much higher accommodation costs for many in London, which contribute to in-work poverty. However, the last Government hit something like 30,000 working people in Southwark with reductions in support and left 700 people in work using the local food bank, according to figures from Pecan, which is part of the Trussell Trust network.

[Gerald Jones]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, and the situation he describes is replicated in many areas across the UK.

Can it be right in 21st-century Britain that many people are working hard and cannot afford to live above the poverty line? As my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East outlined, 85% of people receiving support from the food bank in her constituency are working people. In my constituency, many working families rely on food banks to be able to put food on the table. That is clearly not acceptable.

Years of below-inflation wage increases, particularly in the public sector, have taken their toll on people’s incomes. In-work benefits such as tax credits are meant to support families against the worst effects of in-work poverty. The current proposals to change universal credit will clearly make matters worse for millions of working families. In Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney alone, about 10,000 working families are likely to be adversely affected by the Government’s universal credit proposals by 2020.

Jobs must be a clear and critical part of any programme to end poverty. Access to jobs, and the quality of those jobs, must be addressed if families are to be able to work their way out of poverty. Low pay is a major factor in in-work poverty and is unfortunately a routine feature of much of the work available to poorer families. The national minimum wage sets a floor for pay levels, but one report shows that a couple with two children would need to work 58 hours a week at the minimum wage to lift themselves out of poverty.

As a county councillor prior to being elected to this place last May, I was proud to be associated with the introduction of the living wage at Caerphilly county borough council, one of a growing number of Labour councils in Wales that pay the living wage. I am proud of the many former colleagues in local government across the UK who are championing the true living wage, as promoted by the Living Wage Foundation, not the gimmick national living wage that the Chancellor has announced.

The low-paid sector is characterised by jobs that often do not provide steady employment. Moving in and out of work on a regular basis is common for lone parents and generates grave financial uncertainty for many families. Limits on the number of hours worked and zero-hours contracts mean that many people might work full-time one week, part-time the next and have no work the following week. Even if they have reliable employment, many find it hard to work enough hours, given their caring commitments and other barriers to employment.

Such situations can also compound problems with in-work benefit entitlements, such as housing benefit. The process for benefit assessment cannot be done efficiently, leaving households falling into rent arrears while things are readjusted and threatening the security of their tenure. Often, due to barriers to employment, people do not have the opportunity to increase their hours and therefore their income. As a result, many low-paid jobs are nothing more than poverty traps.

It is not just a lack of income that causes hardship in poorer families. Evidence shows that they also pay higher prices than others for many essential goods and services. Low-income families are often unable to take advantage of the cheaper prices that are routinely offered to customers paying by methods such as direct debit. The situation has been exacerbated by rising utility bills. With fuel prices coming down, the Government should bring more pressure to bear on utility firms to ensure that they do more to pass savings on to customers.

Finally, many people who are in work discover that their jobs are so low paid or insecure that they are unable to provide an income sufficient to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. The Government appear reluctant to reconfigure the tax system so that the richest households pay more of the burden. Policy changes such as the changes to inheritance tax, the reduction in the 50p income tax rate to 45p, the retention of the bedroom tax and the changes to universal credit mean that poorer families will continue to pay more than their fair share of tax.

To make a positive impact on tackling in-work poverty, the Government have to take action on the issues raised during this afternoon’s debate. Unfortunately, we are seeing very little evidence that they are serious about tackling in-work poverty. In fact, some of the Government’s proposals risk making matters worse. Will the Minister outline what the Government are doing to tackle urgently the unacceptable scale of in-work poverty facing people across our country?

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[Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I thank the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for securing the debate. I congratulate her on her passion, her facts and her real commitment to her constituents. It is sometimes refreshing to hear how it really is on the ground in the constituencies and how real people who work hard will suffer more and more because of the Government’s actions.

I commend the contributions of the hon. Members for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Gerald Jones) and for Foyle (Mark Durkan). The hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney mentioned the problem of zero-hours contracts. “Making work pay” or “Work is the best route out of poverty” are great catchphrases, but people do not have a route out of poverty if they are working on zero-hours contracts and do not know from one week to another whether they will be earning or how much they will earn.

The hon. Member for Foyle gave us, as usual, some wonderful quotes. For example, he said that it is not a lack of work ethic that prevents people from working; it is a lack of work. That is true of many places across the country. He also said that there now seems to be one law for the working poor and another for the working rich. That will lead to even more social division across the United Kingdom.

Hon. Members may well be aware that last week the independent adviser on poverty and inequality, Naomi Eisenstadt, reported to the First Minister of Scotland on tackling poverty and she recommended that we build on living wage accreditation, which has been touched on in the debate. The new national living wage that the Conservative party is touting is not actually a new living wage. It is simply a small increase based on the national minimum wage; it is not much higher. It does not involve looking at actual household expenses and relating it to them. In Scotland, the Government have done a lot of work on trying to increase people’s income—maximise their income—and trying to support people in work. One thing that they have done is in the area of procurement. They have ensured that no firm can now get a contract in Scotland that does not pay the national living wage. It is £8.25 in Scotland and should be much higher.

[Neil Coyle]

Does the hon. Lady share our concern that this Government are even trying to scrap the measures of in-work poverty, and are the Scottish Government committed to keeping them?

[Marion Fellows]

The Scottish Government would actually like to have more powers over all this area, but unfortunately the Smith commission agreement or recommendations have not given the Scottish Government that amount of power. However, within what they are allowed to do, they are maximising, as far as they can, the wages that people get and the amount of work that they are able to get.

Another recommendation and another thing that the Scottish Government have been trying to do is to look at more family-friendly policies. A lot of in-work poverty affects women even more than it affects men. One recommendation and one thing that the Scottish Government will try to move forward is more free childcare to allow women to go to work. It is all very well being able to work, but what if people cannot afford the childcare? Again, that affects family incomes, and more and more children are being affected by that.

Scotland has the second highest proportion of employees paid the living wage—about 80%. The highest proportion is in the south-east of England, where it is 81.6%, but that is a function of the fact that there are many jobs in this part of the United Kingdom and employers have to compete in paying people. If there is high unemployment, there is no competition to raise wages. That has to be addressed.

Opposition Members really do believe that work is a good route out of poverty—indeed, it is the best route out of poverty—but we cannot ensure that that is the case unless we support people, and this Government are attacking the lowest-paid people in our communities, the poorest in our communities and the ones who have to work the hardest.

The hon. Member for Swansea East referred to the Minister saying that, because of the cuts that are going to happen and the reduction in the work allowance, people will just have to work longer. That is, in this day and age, an absolutely scandalous thing to say. We totally refute it, because making people work more and more will only make them ill and less able in the long term to provide for their families.

[Neil Coyle]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way again; she is being generous about allowing interventions. Another group of working people may not be able to take on additional hours as a result of ill health or impairment. I do not know whether she is aware of the case of Denise Haddon, which was covered in the Daily Mirror. As a direct result of this Government’s introduction of personal independence payments, thousands of disabled people who are already trying to work and are supported through Motability vehicles will have them withdrawn and may not be able to continue in work.

[Marion Fellows]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Fortunately, I do not always get to read the Daily Mirror; it is not top of my reading list, as people can imagine. However, I am aware, as a constituency MP, of people who are losing PIP or who are being transferred to universal credit and who are suffering real hardship. There is a constant stream of constituents into my office, and I am obviously trying to help them, but it is hard when Government Members are absolutely determined to come down hard on the working poor by cutting some of the benefits that those people rely on to support their families.

This debate has shown that, again, there are real issues that Opposition Members are very keen that the Government should change track on. Whether they will listen I doubt, but it is very important for our constituents that the Government understand the real damage that they are doing to families, especially children and women, with this move. To ask a family to lose £1,300 to £1,600 a year when they are already on minimum wage and have no hope of getting more money is nothing short of disgraceful. It is totally abhorrent, and I hope that the Government will think again about introducing the cuts that they are proposing in April this year.

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[Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)]

I again reiterate my pleasure at serving under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) on securing the debate.

For the second time this week, I appear opposite this Minister in this Chamber. I am starting to get very worried about her and the hon. Member for Macclesfield (David Rutley), because they must be becoming extremely lonely. This is the second time this week that they have appeared in this Chamber without one Tory MP coming along to support them. Not one came for the child poverty debate on Tuesday or has come for this debate today. “Now why is that?”, I ask myself. I cannot believe for a moment that it is anything personal towards them. Nor can I believe that the Tory Whips Office has become so incompetent that it cannot even encourage hon. Members to attend a debate such as this. The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s leadership bid is already so long gone that I cannot believe that he has got them round to the Treasury to glad-hand them. It cannot be that, so why exactly is it?

I can only draw the conclusion that both child poverty and in-work poverty simply are not high enough on the Tory agenda for their MPs to come along here this week. That is the only explanation, and perhaps we should not be too surprised about it, given what the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions said—he does speak occasionally. Indeed, he was in the main Chamber this morning. He came to watch one of his Ministers, as he usually does. I think that he is trying to live up to the reputation of being the quiet man that he got when he was Tory party leader, because he does not say very much, although perhaps in some cases less is more. But he actually said, at the Tory party conference back on 6 October 2015, that he thought that tax credits were a “bribe”. That is how the Secretary of State sees support for people in work, so perhaps it should not surprise us that no Tory MPs are here to support the Minister and the hon. Gentleman.

[Neil Coyle]

Is my hon. Friend aware that in Bermondsey and Old Southwark 6,100 working families were claiming the tax credits that the Secretary of State apparently referred to as a “bribe”? I hope that the Minister will give some reassurance that those families will not be adversely affected by the introduction of universal credit.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I, too, hope that that reassurance will be given this afternoon.

In contrast to the absence of any contribution from Conservative Members, we have heard passionate contributions from the Opposition. My hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East spoke with her usual verve and passion both on the issue and for her constituents. What a telling statistic it is that wage growth this decade is the third worst since 1860, when Palmerston was Prime Minister. That is an incredible and shocking statistic.

My hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Christina Rees) made several very good interventions, and her passion for Wales, in particular, shone through in what she said. Similarly, my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) put his finger on several crucial points, including the delays to universal credit. To be clear about this, I will quote from a press release of 1 November 2011 from the Secretary of State. What did he say? He said:

“Over one million people will be claiming Universal Credit by April 2014”.

[Neil Coyle]

He said it very quietly.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

Indeed, he would have been better off saying it quietly, because in November 2015, the actual figure was 155,568. He should be sanctioning himself, on the basis of such a performance. It shows an absolutely dreadful level of incompetence.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Gerald Jones), who drew on his experience as a county borough councillor, and set out well the measures that Labour councils in Wales are implementing to try to deal with wage levels. My hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) spoke, as he always does, with great authority on the matter. His point about the availability of work, and his quote about there being one rule for the working rich and one for the working poor, really resonated in the context of the debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) on her speech, which was delivered with great passion.

Let us remind ourselves of what the Chancellor—his must be the longest leadership bid in recorded history—said on the “Today” programme on 8 October 2012:

“It is unfair that people listening to this programme going out to work see the neighbour next door with the blinds down because they are on benefits.”

I fundamentally disagree with that statement. The person behind the blinds could be disabled or vulnerable. Dare I say it, they might even have just worked a night shift, although that is something that seems to be lost on the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Chancellor has been trying to draw a division between those who work and those who do not. He is not the only one who has a problem with the language that has been used in the debate. In September, the Secretary of State said, in answer to the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham), that

“the most important point is that we are looking to get that up to the level of normal, non-disabled people who are back in work.”—[Official Report, 7 September 2015; Vol. 599, c. 6.]

Normal, non-disabled people—what kind of language is that? What does that say to somebody who is disabled? I hope that the Minister will take the opportunity this afternoon to distance herself from such shocking remarks.

Even if we accepted that distinction between those who work and those who do not, the Secretary of State is now in such a mess that he is on the wrong side of his own dividing line. It is all very well to say that work is the route out of poverty, and of course we want to see more people in work, but the kind of poverty that we are talking about affects people who have jobs, and who go out to work. As the smoke lifts from the Chancellor’s U-turn on tax credit cuts, it has become clear that he is simply going to make the same £12 billion of cuts to universal credit. No one can tell me that when the Tories were going around during the election campaign and talking about their £12 billion of welfare cuts, people such as cleaners seriously thought that they would be affected.

Let me give another couple of examples. I gave the statistics for single parents to my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East.

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[Priti Patel]

If it were not for the fact that this Government picked up the shambolic legacy of the Labour Government in 2010, rebalanced the economy and, importantly, created the right environment for the creation of new jobs, those new jobs in Wales would not exist today. We have supported lower corporation taxes and lower taxes for businesses to come to the UK to make the UK a much more competitive place.

We have heard voices from around the UK in the debate, including the hon. Members for Foyle (Mark Durkan) and for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows). A record number of jobs have been created in Scotland and wages in Scotland are going up as a result.

[Neil Coyle]

The Minister seems to have the utmost confidence in the economic growth, which does not appear to have been shared in the latest survey of business leaders. Is their nervousness about the current state of the economy perhaps to do with the fact that the Chancellor seems set to take over from the lame duck Prime Minister?

[Priti Patel]

That intervention does not befit the hon. Gentleman.

[Neil Coyle]

That is up to the Chair.

[Priti Patel]

No—I have served with the hon. Gentleman on a Bill Committee in which he has made some valuable contributions. This is not about individuals. We live in a global world. Look at what is happening with the international economy right now. Stock markets around the world, including the UK, have faced a challenging start to the year. Business is right to be sensitive to global factors. I come back to the point that the UK has a highly competitive economy thanks to many difficult decisions undertaken by the Government in the previous Parliament, and we continue to make difficult decisions in this Parliament.

All the contributions this afternoon are valid. The hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw mentioned that individual constituents come to her on a weekly basis. If she would like to share with me her casework examples regarding universal credit, I would be happy to take them up. When it comes to stability, we have made choices. None of the opposition parties has presented solutions to the House this afternoon. Hon. Members said that universal credit should not exist and that they want to scrap it, but they have no alternatives for welfare reform or changes to the welfare system. As we heard in earlier debates today, to govern is to choose. Our choice is to reform welfare and to ensure that we support people into work.

Disabled People: Support

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Wednesday 27th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the changes to funding of support for disabled people.

I thank you, Mr Crausby, for chairing this important debate, and I thank everyone for attending. I also thank all the organisations—especially the Disability Benefits Consortium—that have briefed MPs on today’s debate. [Interruption.] I also thank whoever is phoning.

The debate is important. The disadvantage experienced by disabled people is well evidenced. They are twice as likely as other people to live in poverty. The percentage of working-age disabled people in employment has dropped in recent years. Even in work, disabled people are worse off than non-disabled people. According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, disabled men in work face an 11% pay gap, while disabled women face a 22% pay gap.

Disabled people also experience higher routine costs of living. The Scope-facilitated Extra Costs Commission, which began its work in 2014, has set out in detail the hundreds of pounds that many disabled people spend every week as a direct result of living with certain health conditions and impairments. Sadly, Government policies—particularly since 2010—have made things far worse for disabled people and caused them greater difficulty.

As to my personal background on this issue, my mum has schizophrenia, and that contributed to my work choices —I worked for the Disability Rights Commission, the National Centre for Independent Living and Disability Alliance UK among others. The issue is also very relevant to my constituency, because we have a higher incidence of certain mental health conditions, and about 12,500 disabled people—about one in nine of my constituents —live in Bermondsey and Old Southwark, according to the Library. The issue should, however, matter to everyone, because we should facilitate a society in which anyone can contribute, to the maximum of their potential. Sadly, however, that possibility is being undermined.

The debate’s timing is useful. Tomorrow is the last day of the Government’s consultation on the future of personal independence payments. Fears about disabled people losing work as a direct result of the introduction of personal independence payments are beginning to be realised. Over the weekend, the Daily Mirror covered the case of Denise Haddon which is yet another example of a disabled person who uses a Motability vehicle for work, but who could see that vehicle withdrawn, with them being forced out of work as a direct result of Government policy.

Today, colleagues in the House of Lords—certainly, Labour colleagues—will also be pushing amendments on the work-related activity group cuts in the Welfare Reform and Work Bill, which will affect half a million disabled people. This afternoon, we will have an Opposition day debate on supported housing, in which we will call for an exemption for such housing from housing benefit cuts. This debate is therefore very timely.

The Government have their priorities wrong. They keep coming back to disabled people and undermining support, rather than focusing on areas where there is more potential. Just this week, for example, we saw the Google fiasco, which demonstrates yet again that we are not all in this together and that there is a significant imbalance in whom the Government choose to squeeze more out of.

What is worse, the Government suggest that their measures are about supporting disabled people into work or about providing more support to those who need it most. If they believe that any group of disabled people has definitely benefited more as a direct result of any policy since 2010, I would welcome the Minister providing evidence to back that up.

On work, 53% of working-age disabled people were in work in 2010, but the figure is now under 50%. The Library has pointed out that, of the 320,000 disabled people on employment and support allowance referred to the Work programme since 2011, only 16% got a job. Although 43% of those on Work Choice—a more specialised programme—could be supported into work, which is of benefit, the Government have announced that the two schemes will be merged in 2017. It would be useful to have a stronger indication from the Minister whether we will see a levelling up or a levelling down of the support provided to disabled people. Will we see a return to more specialised, localised support, with smaller suppliers who are better able to provide the dedicated support that many disabled people need? We saw good schemes under things such as the future jobs fund and the working neighbourhoods fund, which were more localised and specialised, but which were unable to compete following the changes introduced in 2010.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. Does he agree that the issue is sometimes ensuring that training makes the right skills available for disabled people? Many disabled people want to get into work, but they are prevented from doing so by the inability to access the very skills they need to get into the workplace.

[Neil Coyle]

I completely agree that that training needs to be there. It would be useful to hear from the Minister how whatever new programme is put in place in 2017 will make training and dedicated, specialised support available.

Another thing we have seen is that the number of disability employment advisers, who have specialist knowledge, has dropped by 20% since 2010. There is now less than one adviser per 600 disabled people who are meant to be supported, so we are heading in the wrong direction.

People have been in touch with me about the Access to Work programme. For anyone who is unfamiliar with it, it is a specialised programme that helps disabled people to retain or attain work. The Department for Work and Pensions used to accept—it seems to shy away from accepting this know—that, for every pound spent on Access to Work, about £1.48 was returned through things such as national insurance contributions and income tax. However, fewer disabled people are now supported under Access to Work than in 2009-10—the figure has dropped from just over 37,000 to 36,700. That needs addressing, and it would be welcome if the Minister told us whether there will be more targeted support under Access to Work to increase those numbers.

In 2014, the Government said they were expanding Access to Work to include work placements acquired by the individual disabled person. I have asked questions about that and received no information to show whether the Government are actually delivering on that. In 2011, the Government said that they accepted all the recommendations of the Sayce review, including those on Access to Work. Perhaps we could have an update on how they are taking forward the review’s retention and promotion aspects. In the 2015 spending review, the Government announced that Access to Work funding would support 25,000 additional disabled people by providing IT help, but we have no information on what that means or how it will be rolled out in practice. It would be useful to hear more about that significant target.

The Down’s Syndrome Association has been in touch and has provided briefing for the debate to highlight its WorkFit programme. The association says the programme has supported 75 individuals with Down’s syndrome into work, but that only three have met the stringent eligibility criteria for Access to Work. The association feels that that needs to change, and it is keen to hear from the Minister whether the Government will take forward its recommendations.

I want to raise the issue of assessments and accessible information. I have a constituent called Norma who lives in Walworth. Her daughter, who is about 50, has learning disabilities and a visual impairment, and she is deaf. The DWP has been contacting Norma to press for her daughter to be assessed, and Norma feels that her daughter is being told she should be working, even though she cannot leave her home without support. Norma feels she is under considerable pressure. I will write to the Minister about this specific example after the debate, and I will encourage him to explain why Norma and her daughter feel they are under such pressure from the DWP.

Disabled people have also been in touch with significant concerns about universal credit. Some projections suggest that universal credit will be about 1,000 years in delivery, so perhaps some of the fears are unnecessary, as we will not be here. However, it appears that the Government have scrapped the limited capability for work element before any disabled person has been able to access it, which will leave 116,000 working disabled people £40 a week worse off. Once again, the idea that the Government want to support people into work is undermined by their policies. Citizens Advice has also highlighted in a report that in-work single disabled people will be worse off because of the scrapping of the severe disability premium, which will leave almost 250,000 disabled people worse off by between £28 and £58 a week. The Children’s Society has pointed out that, under universal credit, 100,000 disabled children could also lose £28 a week. I ask the Minister what message that sends to those disabled people.

Employment and support allowance is also a significant concern for many of my constituents, 5,630 of whom receive it. The Government recently announced that a cut of £1.4 billion will affect disabled people in the work-related activity group; that is £30 a week for half a million disabled people. DWP statistics show who those people are. They include a quarter of a million people with learning disabilities, autism or significant mental health problems. Again, I ask the Minister why those specific people were chosen for that measure. What are the Government seeking to achieve by targeting such a disadvantaged and vulnerable group?

An example given to me by Parkinson’s UK shows something of the challenge that disabled people have in accepting that the Government agenda is genuine. In a written answer to a question by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr Godsiff) on Monday, the Minister for Employment revealed that since 2008, when ESA was introduced, 200 people with Parkinson’s in the work-related activity group were assessed and given a medical prognosis by the DWP that they would not be able to return to work for at least two years, or longer. The Department is telling people whom it has assessed as unable to work for two years that they will be receiving £1,500 less per year to get them back into work within that period. I hope that the Minister will comment on that. I hope, too, that he will answer the suggestion raised elsewhere that there will be no change for those already in the work-related activity group. Does that include those whose circumstances change, and those who undergo repeat assessments?

The change to ESA follows previous changes, including the time limiting of some support, which has left 280,000 disabled people with no out-of-work benefit. Some have very low incomes, and it is most unfortunate that the Government have managed to pick that group for an increase in poverty. I would welcome a comment from the Minister about that.

I want briefly to cover sanctions. In its briefing, the Child Poverty Action Group highlighted the fact that some sanctions mean that 100% of a person’s financial support goes. Those sanctions can last up to three years, under the increasingly automated system introduced by the previous Government. [Interruption.] I am glad that some Members find that funny. I find that very strange. Would the hon. Gentleman like to intervene?

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

No, because I am about to make a speech, but I thank the hon. Gentleman for the offer.

[Neil Coyle]

The hon. Gentleman is welcome. Perhaps I will enjoy his contribution as much as he appears to be enjoying mine.

The concern that I have about sanctions is the growing number of disabled people who experience them; 70,000 sanctions have been imposed on ESA claimants between December 2012 and June 2015 alone. The Select Committee on Work and Pensions highlighted the fact that safeguards may not always work effectively. My question for the Minister is: if he believes the system is adequate, how has he responded to the Committee’s recommendations, and when will the Department publish its own findings of a review of sanctions? Furthermore, as sanctions and benefit changes are specifically mentioned in some people’s suicide notes, how does the Department support Jobcentre Plus staff and other agencies in handling suicidal claimants and those who raise the matter of suicide in meetings with Government officials?

Disability living allowance and personal independence payments are a growing concern for many disabled people. In Bermondsey and Old Southwark, 3,600 working-age disabled people will be affected by the abolition of DLA and hundreds more children will be affected as they reach the age of 16. The DWP has revealed that 607,000 disabled people will lose help with the abolition of DLA. That struck me as quite odd, given that a former Minister for Disabled People accused charities of scaremongering, such as when the Disability Action Alliance suggested that half a million disabled people would be affected. Now that the Government have revealed that the figure will be 607,000, perhaps Ministers should apologise to the charities they accused. Instead, the Government attacks charities’ ability to challenge the Government agenda, which is most unfortunate.

The Disability Benefits Consortium, among others, recommended that there should be better trials of the new assessment process. The DWP chose to ignore that advice; then the National Audit Office reported that the early operational performance of PIP was poor, and the Public Accounts Committee suggested that early delivery was

“nothing short of a fiasco”.

What assessment is the Minister making and what monitoring is the Department undertaking of those changes and how they are affecting disabled people’s ability to work, in the context of the stories about Denise Haddon and others? What is the impact of the changes on NHS demand, for example? It would also be useful to have an update on the backlog of PIP assessments. Citizens Advice reported in August that PIP has now overtaken ESA as the most complained-about benefit system.

I want briefly to focus on the bedroom tax. The DWP acknowledges that two out of three people affected by the bedroom tax are disabled people. That is 440,000 disabled people. Assuming that average amount is £14 per week since the introduction of the bedroom tax, by the time it reaches its third birthday at the end of April, it will amount to a disability tax of almost £1 billion. Disabled people are also affected by issues such as the freezing of benefit of uprating. Even for those on ESA, the value of the uprating for the vast majority of their benefits is lower than the rises in their energy bills or transport costs, for example.

On housing, I have been contacted by John, who is pleased about this debate and the one this afternoon. He says that he lives in supported housing, which he relies on to live independently. He says that he has

“lived securely, independently and safely in a social housing wheelchair designated flat provided by Habinteg for 27 years and this is now potentially under threat.”

Many of his neighbours have considerably greater needs and are equally threatened. He finds the threat alone destabilising, let alone what could happen if the changes go through as the Government intend. He believes that the Government’s plans will stem the supply of wheelchair-accessible housing, particularly as there is already a shortfall in the availability of genuinely accessible housing. Has the Minister undertaken any impact assessment of how that specific change will affect the supply of accessible housing over time, given that we have an ageing population and growing demand for wheelchair-accessible homes?

On social care, a recent report from the Royal National Institute of Blind People and Age UK suggested that more than 12,000 blind and partially sighted people over 65 lost access to social care between 2009 and 2013. That is more than a third of those who were previously getting support. The role of the Under-Secretary of State for Disabled People should not just be to act as an apologist for the DWP. It should be cross-Government. I am intrigued to know what monitoring the Minister is undertaking with colleagues at the Department for Communities and Local Government, or the Department of Health, about where those disabled people go next if they lose social care. For example, is there a rise in demand for NHS services? Reductions in support for disabled people inevitably mean an increase in the demand for informal carers, who, without adequate support, can go on to experience health conditions and impairments of their own. There has been a rise in the number of children providing support for disabled parents and grandparents, which is a risk to their own long-term prospects if they do not receive sufficient support.

The independent living fund is being abolished. Its 18,000 users are very nervous about what happens next. It would be useful to have an indication from the Minister about how the people who lose it will be monitored, to see where they go next, given that the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services estimates that social care has lost £3.5 billion in funding since 2010. Many councils are losing about 28% of their budget but are spending about a third of their entire budget on social care. Councils cannot pick up the loss; they cannot step in and fill that gap.

I am sure that the Minister will want to mention the better care fund. My understanding of that fund is that it will only support new services, so those losing independent living fund support may not qualify for help. Scope, Mencap, Leonard Cheshire Disability and the National Autistic Society have estimated that one in six care users have fallen out of the system since 2008, and a further 36,000 working-age disabled people could lose access under the latest cuts as a result of the autumn statement. Will the Minister comment on what that loss could mean for other Government services?

Not only have social security and social care services been undermined by changes since 2010, but changes to a whole range of services used and needed by disabled people have had a negative impact. For example, there are 3,000 fewer nurses and hundreds fewer doctors in mental healthcare than in 2010. In my borough, we have therefore seen a rise in crisis treatment—that is, a rise in the number of people with mental health problems arriving at A&E, rather than having the right support further upstream.

In education, we have seen changes to the disabled students’ allowance. Randstad provided a briefing for this debate in which it highlights its concerns about both the changes to DSA and the regulatory change to how provision is administered. It quotes its survey of disabled students, which found that almost 28% of disabled students would not have attended university if DSA had not been available. Another third said they were unsure whether they would have attended university. The survey also found that more than three quarters of disabled students said that attending university as a disabled student was more expensive, with 42% saying they were more likely to drop out as a result of losing DSA. Furthermore, 87% of students said they were concerned that not completing their studies would impact on their future employment prospects. Will the Minister try to demonstrate that the Government are taking a long-term approach and looking at what DSA changes might mean in lowering income for disabled people and lowering tax contributions to the Government in the longer term?

Even on legal aid, the Government have acknowledged that changes to funding have the potential to discriminate against disabled people unduly. That is borne out in the case summaries since the changes. In 2011-12, there were 7,676 disability discrimination-related cases. That has fallen to 3,106 cases—less than half—in the last year stats were available. That collapse is not due to discrimination ending, though it would be useful if that were so. The Government’s concern should be that, without disabled people receiving the right support, the Government will not meet their commendable target to cut the employment gap for disabled people.

I suspect that the Minister will mention in his contribution the £50 billion a year spent on disabled people. The Resolution Foundation estimates that disabled people have lost more than £28 billion in support under a range of funding changes since 2010. If the Minister were to use that figure, he would therefore acknowledge that the Government have cut resources by about one third. That is not a record I would trumpet. It would be welcome if that figure were broken down into the different pots of support it covers. My concern is that it includes social care funding, without taking into account the charges that many disabled people pay to use social services, so it is not representative.

I want to conclude with a reference to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities inquiry into the rights of people with disabilities in the UK, which should report next year. Investigations by the committee are confidential, and the process, extent and scope of the inquiry are unknown, but it is widely believed that it will consider policies introduced by the coalition Government since 2010 in relation to welfare and social security benefits and, in particular, their compatibility with articles 19 and 28 of the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities, which cover their rights to live independently and to enjoy an adequate standard of living.

The UK is the first country in the world to be investigated by the UN in relation to that convention. We have moved from being at the forefront of disability rights, respect and inclusion globally to being the first state in the world under investigation for rolling back disabled people’s rights and undermining their equal citizenship. I simply end by asking the Minister this: can he genuinely be proud of that position for the UK?

[Mr David Crausby (in the Chair)]

I intend to call the three Front-Bench Members starting at 10.30 am. If they could give Mr Coyle an opportunity to sum up briefly at the end, I would appreciate it. I do not intend to impose a time limit, but if Members could self-regulate, that would be best.

--- Later in debate ---

[Justin Tomlinson]

The consultation is just completing, and we will analyse what people have had to say. We were right to do that following the Paul Gray review. He highlighted the issue following court judgments. On an earlier point, rather than waiting for the courts to continue to drag it through, it is right and proper that we have a thorough look at it, but I do not want to pre-empt any consultation. We are continuing to look to improve the PIP process, and I look forward to reading the hon. Lady’s comments, assuming that she has fed into that consultation.

Only 16% of DLA claimants secured the highest rate, and the figure is now 22.5% under PIP. As a specific example of an area of disability where people have benefited from the changes, 22% of those with a mental health condition would get the highest rate of DLA, but now 68% of mental health claimants are on enhanced PIP.

[Neil Coyle]

But that is not someone getting more support but someone qualifying for exactly the same support that existed previously under DLA, a system that actually cost less to run.

[Justin Tomlinson]

My point is that only 22% of those with mental health conditions would have qualified, and now the figure is at 68%, so more people with a mental health condition are qualifying for the enhanced rate. That is one example, and there are others.

We are in the process of the full roll-out, taking the 1.7 million DLA claimants over to PIP, but please be assured that that is being done in a controlled, measured and timely manner that learns the lessons of the reviews. We are doing the roll-out in a manner that meets the available capacity so as not to repeat the mistakes of when PIP was first launched. The disabled facilities grant currently funds about 40,000 house adaptations a year, and I am delighted that funding is due to increase by 79% next year from £220 million to £394 million.

A number of Members talked about working across the Government, which is a big part of my role. I meet not only Ministers but Opposition Members and Lords stakeholders. I make lots of visits, which is a part of my role that I very much enjoy. My door is always open, and I have met a number of speakers here today.

Some 16,900 have transferred from the independent living fund, of whom 91% already had some form of their care provided by the local authority. The funding was transferred in full. The protection was underwritten by the Care Act 2014. The Department for Work and Pensions, the Department of Health, the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Treasury are keeping a close eye on that as it progresses. I understand the importance of the issue, on which we have had many debates.

We must not forget that ESA WRAG was not a golden solution; it had been criticised by all parties for a long time. Only 1% of claimants a month were coming off that benefit into work. No Government ever invented could have spun that as anything other than failing the people it was meant to serve. Those already receiving ESA will see no cash loss. Anyone whose capacity to work is limited by severe work-limiting health conditions and disabilities will continue to remain in that support group. Existing claimants who undergo a work capability reassessment after April 2017 and are placed in, or remain in, the WRAG will continue to receive that additional rate.

The Government have invested an extra £1.25 billion in mental health support, and in our area we are doing a series of pilots on group work, telephone support, face to face, online and inside jobcentres to look seriously at how we can do that and scale it across the country to help people as quickly as possible, which is clearly the key. On the disabled students allowance, we recognise that progress has been made since the Equality Acts. Universities, like all public sector bodies, have a duty to comply with the law. We should not be paying for things that they should be doing and are underwritten by law. I have had a number of meetings on that, and I will continue to keep a close eye on it.

Finally, on accessible information, the Royal National Institute of Blind People rightly challenged me because it felt that the Government were inconsistent in how they presented information. It is important that my Department leads on that, as well as pushing the rest of the Government, so I set up a taskforce that includes the RNIB and a number of organisations and people with a wealth of experience who will work through how we communicate our information. I understand that, when people are looking to use services and claim benefits, we need to make their journey as easy and as helpful as possible, and I am delighted that so many organisations are supporting that valuable work.

It is a pleasure to have responded to this helpful debate, which is a credit to the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark.

[Neil Coyle]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Crausby. I thank everyone who has contributed to this debate. The Minister seems to have left most of my questions unanswered, particularly on unemployment—there was just some indication there. I share the concern of the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) that, although we welcome the commitment to halve the gap, there is a reverse-Ronseal approach coming from the Government. The approach is not doing what it says on the tin. The number of people supported by Access to Work, for example, seems to be heading the wrong way.

On DSA and universities needing to do more, it goes back to the point raised by the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) and my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams). Look at the court case today: the Government do not do what they are meant to do on impact assessing or following their own Equality Act obligations. That from the Department that is directly responsible for representing disabled people and much of central Government disability policy. The Government are not doing enough, and to try to pass responsibility on to universities when the Government are failing to uphold their own responsibilities is crude.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) for her contribution. I completely share her concern about the Government’s risky, uncertain and late approach, and I thank her for all her work with Carers UK, which is based in my constituency. I consider her an honorary constituent simply because of the amount of time she spends with Carers UK.

The hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) mentioned funding, but the Government still do not seem to co-ordinate a longer-term approach to planning. What happens when disabled people lose support and end up making increased demands on the NHS? He made lots of points about the extra costs of disability and then seemed to suggest, in some kind of sick joke, that disabled people in the work-related activity group of ESA should get JSA, which would be a considerable reduction in financial payment, because it might incentivise them into work sooner when we know they have health issues. That is a completely unacceptable approach, and sadly that is what we see time and again from a Government whose priorities are upside down—tax is not collected where it should be, and they keep coming back to disabled people for more.

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).

Housing Benefit and Supported Housing

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Wednesday 27th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

I do not often disagree with my hon. Friend, but I do not agree that that is the solution. It is absolutely clear, as the motion says, that the Government need to act immediately and confirm that they will exempt in full supported housing from these housing benefit cuts. They then need to work with housing providers to ensure that such housing can be developed and secured for the future. I hope that my hon. Friend accepts that argument and will back us in the Lobby today.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend suggests that the Government do not know what they are doing, but does he agree that it could be suggested that they do not care about the people whom they are directly affecting? They should care, however, that the Homes and Communities Agency has estimated that its investment in supported housing results in a net benefit of £640 million a year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Justin Tomlinson]

I have made it clear that, for those in supported housing, the change will be delayed for a year as we conduct the urgent review.

On the rationale for changes in the social rented sector, we will stick to our principles of protecting the most vulnerable. However, these are important reforms. We inherited a burgeoning housing benefits bill that we had to get control of. We have started to do that, but we need to go further. The housing benefit bill for England has risen by over 20% during the past 10 years, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) said. Part of the reason is that the rises in social rents have outstripped those in the private sector, as highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake). Social rents are up by 60% compared with 23% in the private sector. In the private sector, the local housing allowance curbs the spiralling housing benefit bill, but there is no similar restraint in the social sector. That is why we are going to cap social sector rents in the same way as in the private sector, thereby reducing rents in the social sector. We should remember that this will help the one third of people in this sector who do not claim any housing benefit and whose rents will come down. However, we will continue to protect the most vulnerable.

This is just part of our wider housing reforms. We are improving access, creating more choice and building more affordable homes. We are doubling the housing budget to more than £20 billion over the next five years to help to ensure that housing is prioritised for those who need it most.

[Neil Coyle]

Will the Minister give way?

[Justin Tomlinson]

No. I am short of time.

Under Labour, the number of social and affordable rented homes fell by 400,000, but under the Conservative Government, 700,000 new homes have been built in the past five years, of which 270,000 are affordable homes. We are broadening opportunities for people to access housing through Help to Buy, right to buy and the £8 billion commitment to deliver 400,000 more affordable home starts. This Government are tackling the chronic problems of under-supply and access to housing, which the Labour party failed to do.

In conclusion, we will not fall into the trap of Labour’s blank-cheque approach by paying away problems without making any real or meaningful reforms to welfare. Our reforms bring fairness for hard-working taxpayers and make the welfare budget more sustainable for the future, and we are doing that while providing the right protection for the most vulnerable in society.

Question put.

Benefit Sanctions

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Wednesday 16th December 2015 Westminster Hall

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered benefit sanctions.

I am very pleased to have the opportunity to lead this short debate this afternoon. Members will be aware that I have debated this topic with Ministers several times in the past, and that I have been at pains during those debates to raise concerns about the impact of conditionality on vulnerable claimants. At the forefront of those debates has been the disproportionate level of sanctions imposed on people with mental illness. I met the Under-Secretary of State for Disabled People not long ago to discuss some of the ways in which the Government might address the acknowledged shortcomings in the regime for those with serious mental illnesses and other fluctuating conditions. However, I am glad that the Minister for Employment is responding to today’s debate, because I think the wider issues sit far more appropriately in her portfolio.

As I have argued before, one of the reasons why the sanctions regime is failing vulnerable people so badly is the underlying problem with the work capability assessment. High levels of sanctioning among people who are ill or very disadvantaged is, in part, symptomatic of people being found fit for work when they are not really fit for work. Until that gets fixed, I fear we are destined to go round in circles. But that is not the whole story. Although I do not think anyone would dismiss the value of conditionality in the benefits system per se, the conditions that the Government set need to be proportionate and fair, and I do not think we can say that at the moment, particularly for the more vulnerable claimants.

The Government’s announcement a few weeks back that they intend to pilot a so-called yellow card scheme for sanctions in the new year is, I think, an acknowledgement that the system is not working very well at present. I hope the Minister will take the opportunity today to set out in more detail how that warning system will work in practice, and, specifically, what protection there will be for those who are identified as vulnerable.

My main call today echoes the calls I have made previously, and that the Work and Pensions Committee made in the previous Parliament, for a full independent review of the benefit sanctions regime. That is necessary and long overdue. I fear that tinkering around the edges of the system will not resolve the systemic weaknesses, and this afternoon I want to highlight a growing body of evidence that sanctions are not only failing to support claimants into work, but are actually having a counterproductive effect, undermining the Government’s policy objectives and causing unacceptable levels of hardship and destitution to vulnerable and disadvantaged people.

Last week the homelessness charity, Crisis, published a major piece of research undertaken at Sheffield Hallam University into homeless people’s experiences of welfare conditionality and benefit sanctions. It is a significant and timely piece of work; it is the largest study of its kind ever carried out, and it provides a robust qualitative evidence base for how sanctions are affecting vulnerable claimants. The researchers drew on the experiences of more than a thousand people who use homelessness services in England and Scotland, and looked specifically at the impact of sanctions on their lives and employment prospects. Distressing individual stories are documented in the report, and I urge the Minister and other hon. Members to read it. It deserves to be widely read.

There are many reasons why people become homeless or precariously housed. Often in the past, relationship breakdown has been cited as the single biggest reason why someone will end up homeless, but more recently that has been overtaken by problems with benefits, particularly among those who have been sanctioned. In many cases, though, homelessness is itself a symptom of underlying vulnerabilities. Young people leaving care; people with long-term mental health problems; people with addictions; and people with borderline learning disabilities who have trouble with literacy or numeracy—those are all high risk factors for becoming homeless, but what the Crisis research found was that the most vulnerable claimants were those at the greatest risk of being sanctioned. They also found that, far from pushing people to secure work, sanctions were actually pushing people further away from the labour market. To my mind, that is an extremely serious finding, because it undermines the Government’s assertion that sanctions are helping to bring down claimant numbers and are playing a positive role in getting people into work.

As far as vulnerable claimants are concerned, that is simply not where the evidence leads. Research from the University of Oxford and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, published earlier this year, found that

“Sanctions do not appear to help people return to work. There is a real concern that sanctioned persons are disappearing from view.”

Similarly, the Economic and Social Research Council has questioned the effectiveness of conditionality in getting people into work, and the Department for Work and Pensions’ own evaluation of Jobcentre Plus in 2013 concluded that there was no evidence to suggest that knowledge of jobseeker’s allowance conditionality led to actual movement into work. However, there is mounting evidence that sanctions are a key driver of the growth in demand for food banks and are causing unprecedented hardship, and now there is evidence that they are fuelling homelessness.

The number of people being sanctioned has fallen from its peak in the year to October 2013. Since that time, the labour market has improved significantly, and the number of people claiming jobseeker’s allowance or its successor benefit, universal credit, has fallen by 41%, so we would expect to see a corresponding fall in the number of people being sanctioned. What is more revealing is that we have also seen a smaller, underlying downward trend in the proportion of claimants being sanctioned, which has fallen to 4.92% a month in the year to June 2015, from a high of 6.77% a month in the previous year. That, however, is still dramatically higher than the pre-2012 rates prior to the introduction of the new regime, and a staggering proportion of sanctions—more than two thirds—are now overturned on appeal, where claimants challenge the decision. I know from speaking to colleagues in Citizens Advice that it now urges people who are sanctioned to appeal against that first sanction. If people do not appeal against that first sanction, there is a real risk that if they are sanctioned again, the consequences will be devastating for their incomes.

Research carried out by Dr David Webster of Glasgow University highlights a couple of very important statistical limitations of the data that we have on sanctions. First, the recorded stats show sanctions only after reviews, considerations and appeals, so there is a time lag in the data, and the figures do not tell us how many people actually had their benefit money stopped in the first place. Also, and more significantly, as the DWP has been making the transfer to universal credit, new single claimants of unemployment benefits are going on to that benefit instead of on to JSA, and absolutely no data have been published on universal credit sanctions. This is now having what researchers describe as a “significant distorting effect” on analysis, because the number of those at risk of JSA sanctions is being reduced. Moreover, the young single claimants now more likely to be on universal credit—almost half of them are under 25—were previously twice as likely, statistically, to be sanctioned under JSA, so the distortion in the data could be amplified by that, but without hard data, we simply do not know. So we need that data on universal credit.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate. She has made an interesting point about jobseeker’s allowance, but there are data to show that in the past couple of years there has been a significant increase in the number of disabled people in receipt of employment and support allowance who have been sanctioned, up from 1,400 in March 2013 to 5,400 in March 2014, according to the Crisis figures that I believe the hon. Lady was citing.

The hon. Lady made comments about improving the work capability assessment. Even if the WCA were improved, what is her solution to the sanctions on disabled people on employment and support allowance?

[Mrs Cheryl Gillan (in the Chair)]

May I remind hon. Members that interventions are supposed to be short and pithy?

--- Later in debate ---

[Anne McLaughlin]

We are not missing the point. Most of us have been there ourselves. Most of us have been unemployed and looking for work. None of us was born with a silver spoon in our mouth. None of us has had a job for the boys. Most of us have experienced living on benefits. I am telling the hon. Gentleman that the way to get people into work is to support them, understand them and build their confidence, not to attack or threaten them and certainly not to take away the means by which they feed and clothe themselves and their children.

[Neil Coyle]

Does the hon. Lady share my concern about the despicable comments that we just heard? We are talking about disabled people with mental health conditions or learning disabilities. A quarter of a million people on employment support allowance have been found unfit for work. It is disgraceful to be pretending that this is about supporting them back into work. This is about taking money from disadvantaged people.

[Anne McLaughlin]

I will finish by completely agreeing with the hon. Gentleman. I have had a constituent—a grown man—crying to me on the phone. He once had a lot of self-respect. He once had a tough job that he worked really hard at. He became ill, but he has not been believed. He is now talking to me about ending his life. I do not know what to say to him. The hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Michael Tomlinson) pretends that this is all about getting people into work, but why does he not listen to what we are telling him? Why does he not listen to the evidence? He may believe something else, but he needs to open his ears and start listening.

Oral Answers to Questions

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Monday 7th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vara]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. The latest figures show that the employment rate for young people who have left full-time education is above the UK average and is at its highest level for a decade at 74.3%.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

Low pay and training needs affect many disabled people. Two years ago, almost to the day, the Department announced the extension of the Access to Work programme to disabled people seeking training, internships and apprenticeships. How many people have benefited from that scheme and when will we hear about its progress?

[Mr Vara]

We are very close to record levels as far as that initiative is concerned. As I said earlier, our long-term economic plan is continuing. While I am at the Dispatch Box, may I say that the House has considerable sympathy with all that the hon. Gentleman and a lot of his colleagues are going through?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Duncan Smith]

My apologies to the hon. Lady. May I say to her that we will come back with our exact reasons and rationale for how we will decide that? The reality remains, however—and this is, I believe, popular among the public—that those who make choices and take responsibility for them want everyone else to do the same as well.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Points of order come after statements. I shall await with eager anticipation the hon. Gentleman’s point of order.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Eleventh sitting)

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Debbie Abrahams]

Will the Minister give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Coyle]

On childcare, will the Minister explain how families with children older than the qualifying age will benefit from that policy?

[Priti Patel]

They will benefit from tax-free childcare. That will be available for families whose children are at school—basically, those who are still school age. That is a Treasury policy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Emily Thornberry]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

The new clause is about having a review of the application of sanctions. Many shadows have fallen upon our discussions over the past few weeks. This particular shadow is whether there is a link between welfare reform and work. What happens to people who do not live up to the requirements imposed on them?

Too often in recent years the Government’s focus has been on a target-driven approach that has assumed that anyone out of work simply lacks willpower. The cornerstone of that approach has been the sanctions regime. The Committee might remember that the previous Minister for Employment, who lost her seat at the last election, took the view that

“people who get sanctions are wilfully rejecting support for no good reason”.

The evidence, however, had she or any of her colleagues cared to look, suggests otherwise.

As the Minister frequently reminds us, and as I am sure she will remind us again today, it is true that conditions have always been attached to the social safety net since unemployment benefit was first introduced in 1911. Nevertheless, the Government mislead the public when they fail to acknowledge that the sanctions regime introduced as part of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 marked a radical departure from the history of the welfare state and from the entire principle of evidence-based policy making.

The official justification of the Department for Work and Pensions for sanctions remains that

“they are there to encourage claimants to take reasonable steps to find employment or move closer to the labour market”,

but its own impact assessment for the 2012 changes acknowledged that there was insufficient evidence for the proposed approach achieving that. Since then, of course, extensive evidence has emerged that demonstrates that sanctions are deeply counterproductive if helping people into work is really the intention.

The number of people claiming jobseeker’s allowance has fallen since 2012, but that has coincided with a significant rise in the number of people whom the Office for National Statistics classes as economically inactive—not unemployed or claiming jobseeker’s allowance, but statistically almost non-people. Interestingly, many of those economically inactive people, if asked why they have become economically inactive, give their reason as being discouraged. So that is their reason—they have been discouraged and so dropped out of the labour market altogether. I would have thought it was important to do some work on what “discouraged” means and on the experiences of those discouraged people, because there might well be a clear link between cause and effect.

Research published in January by Oxford’s Professor David Stuckler found that, of those sanctioned between 2011 and 2014 who subsequently stopped claiming benefits altogether, only 20% said that it was because they had found work. According to the professor, all those people were sanctioned and 80% of them then stopped claiming benefits, but not because they had found work. So they are all off the jobseeker’s allowance statistics and are no longer unemployed. In some ways, therefore, perhaps there has been some success.

To the extent that increased sanctions have had an identifiable impact at all, it has been to increase dramatically the levels of hardship and poverty in recent years, as illustrated most starkly in the extraordinary rise in food bank use. I do not know how many Members were at the Trussell Trust breakfast this morning, but one of the stories I heard arose because the trust has started to give medical advice at some of its food banks. It was giving medical advice to a nurse who had a condition that meant she needed to take various pills. The nurse in her knew that she had to take the pills regularly, but the mother in her knew that, because their tax credits had been wrongly taken away and they were in great need, she had to give the food in the cupboard to her children. So she was taking the pills without having eaten anything and was causing herself more harm. There are hundreds of thousands of these stories and unfortunately things seem to be getting worse, not better. We understand that last year, a million people took advantage of food banks. One has to wonder what would happen if they were not available. According to the 2014 survey by the Trussell Trust, 83% of food banks said that the new sanctions regime had caused an increase in the number of people needing their help.

Another very odd thing about the sanctions regime, which would be addressed if the new clause were accepted, is that different towns and villages have different numbers of people going to food banks and different levels of sanctions. There is one jobcentre where in one month, 40% of people were on sanctions. If there are such extraordinary variations happening within the system, there is clearly unfairness. If individuals within jobcentres are given powers and exercise them with a wide element of discretion, that discretion will clearly be exercised differently in different jobcentres. In some areas there will be more strain on food banks, let alone on the poorest and most vulnerable who continue to be sanctioned.

[Neil Coyle]

It might surprise my hon. Friend to learn that part of the strain on the resources of the food bank in Southwark, which is provided by Pecan as part of the Trussell Trust’s network, comes from people in work. Some 10% of that food bank’s users are working, and the Government have just made that a whole lot worse with their tax credit changes.

[Emily Thornberry]

My hon. Friend is right. The range of people going to food banks is very alarming. It is not enough to say, “Oh well, it’s because people know that there are food banks now. They didn’t know about them in the past, but now they do, and they are going in because it’s free and taking a can of beans, but they don’t really need it.” That may be how some Government Members feel that people behave. There is another point of view, which is that to go to a food bank is completely humiliating. It is the worst.

I raise my own personal experience again. After my family got thrown out by the men with the bowler hats and went into social housing, I remember my mother used to get boxes of food from friends. It was embarrassing, but it was the way we kept things together; there were no food banks at that point. I remember that one of the food boxes always used to include Campbell’s meatballs. My mother kept them under the stairs and threatened us that if we did not eat what was on our plates, we were going to have to eat the meatballs instead. They may still be under the stairs for all I know. But at least those boxes of food were delivered to our door, instead of my mother having to go out to ask for food. That is humiliating for anybody, for heaven’s sake.

What the Government’s sanctions regime has brought us is increased hardship and suffering, with no tangible gains in the likelihood that those affected will move into work as a result. If we could be confident that all this suffering was resulting in something good, that there was meaning and that people were moving into work who would not have moved into work otherwise—can the Conservative party show us some real evidence of that?—that would take some of the edge off the terrible stories that we hear, which show that the sanctions regime is simply unfair. How on earth do people manage if they are living from hand to mouth, have no savings and have exhausted the support they can ask for from their families and friends, but then are sanctioned a third time and given nothing for three months?

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[Priti Patel]

Let me start by saying that the Government keep the operation of the sanctions system under constant review to ensure that it continues to function effectively and fairly. Where we identify an issue, we will act to put it right. It is therefore unnecessary to embed the implementation of a review in the Bill. The Government have made a number of improvements to the JSA and ESA sanction systems following recommendations made by the independent review led by Matthew Oakley only last year. That improvement work is continuing to ensure that the Oakley recommendations are acted on in the right way where possible. In addition, we are taking the opportunity to ensure that the ongoing improvements in the review are built into the design and delivery of universal credit.

We have not only responded promptly and positively to the recommendations, but have gone further. We have improved the clarity of the JSA and ESA hardship application process, and made improvements to the payment process to ensure that payments are made within three days. We have carried out a review to check that our systems are operating effectively in respect of housing benefit, and that housing benefit is not impacted when a sanction is applied. We have introduced an improved claimant commitment for JSA jobseekers on the Work programme. We have also revised guidance to encourage jobseekers to share that claimant commitment with their provider. That will ensure that jobseekers understand what is required of them—their responsibilities both to Jobcentre Plus work coaches and Work programme providers—and that providers are clear on any previously agreed restrictions for the jobseeker, helping them to design tailored support.

We have made significant improvements to the decision-making process to ensure that doubts about actively seeking work are resolved quickly. The vast majority of decisions are now made within 48 hours, including consideration of good reasons. Our systems are ensuring that, when decisions are made in the jobseeker’s favour, their benefit payments are transferred to them using faster electronic payment systems to ensure that payment reaches their account on the same day.

I would like to touch on a couple of the points hon. Members have made. Sanctions were discussed in Committees in the previous Parliament, and there have been many debates about sanctions in the Commons Chamber and in Committees. Each month, more than 99% of ESA claimants comply with the requirements that are asked of them with regard to sanctions, and the individuals are asked only to meet the requirements that they agree with their advisers. That includes consideration of any health conditions, disabilities or health impairments.

[Neil Coyle]

There are individual examples. A man with a visual impairment and who has a guide dog was sanctioned for non-compliance. He did not know what the agreement said, because he was never sent it in an accessible format—he never had a Braille copy of the agreement. That was raised with the Royal National Institute of Blind People. A case was raised with Mencap of someone with a significant learning disability who never understood what the agreement meant, could not comply with the proposals that he had supposedly agreed to, and ended up being sanctioned. Does the Minister agree that those examples do not reflect a system that she has described as effective and fair? Where is the Department’s review of accessible formats provision?

[Priti Patel]

The hon. Gentleman is right to give those examples. What happened is not right. He mentions accessible formats. I will go away and report back to him on that, but what happened in that case is simply not right—that should not have happened to someone with a visual impairment.

The Department is considering the contents of the Work and Pensions Committee report and looks forward to working with it not just on that, but on future reports.

I come back to my point that, with all our policies, we will keep the operation of the sanctions system under review. We are focusing our efforts on continuing to improve the process on JSA and ESA to ensure that the agreed recommendations can continue to be delivered in the existing universal credit live service and embedded into the design and build of the emerging universal credit digital service. On the basis that we have a system of continually reviewing the sanctions system and are looking at it with regard to the universal credit live and digital services, I urge the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury to withdraw the new clause.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Eighth sitting)

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Public Bill Committees

Employment and support allowance: work-related activity component

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

I beg to move amendment 139, in clause 13,  page 14,  line 21, at end insert—

‘(5A) The Secretary of State must make provision for additional personalised and specialist employment support in connection with subsections (1) to (3).

(5B) The Secretary of State must issue guidance on the following—

(a) the forms of personalised and specialist employment support;

(b) the means by which a diverse market of suppliers for personalised and specialist employment support can be developed in local areas; and

(c) information for local authorities seeking to improve local disability employment rates.’

To provide additional specialist employment support for disabled people.

I thank all Members for their understanding earlier and apologise for the interruption to our business, which was due to some sad family news.

Amendment 139 would require the Secretary of State to make provision for additional personalised and specialist employment support for disabled people. As we have heard previously in the Committee, the Government’s ambition of halving the disability employment gap is welcome, but it represents a not insignificant challenge and much more detail is needed for Committee members to be able to scrutinise how itis to be achieved. It is unclear from the Bill how Ministers intend practically to narrow the disability employment gap.

Of course, we operate in the context of what has happened in the past five years in particular, when we have seen the number of disability employment advisers at Jobcentre Plus drop; the number of disabled people supported by Access to Work, in particular, fall; work capability assessments being delayed or made inaccurately; and a lower percentage of working-age disabled people actually supported into work. We have a Work programme that has not had the highest success rate in ensuring that disabled people go on into employment. Many disabled people can and want to work, but face significant barriers to entering and staying in work. That is why specialist employment support is crucial, and this amendment is aimed at securing information from Ministers to ensure that that is delivered and is effective.

The Committee heard a great deal from witnesses about the kind of employment support that would be effective, the improvements that are needed and the lack of support that disabled people currently feel able to access. We have heard from the Minister that the Government plan to invest in additional employment support for disabled people, starting at £60 million a year from 2016-17 and rising to £100 million a year by 2021. That is positive and welcome, but it is important to understand how it will be used and how its efficacy will be measured. As yet we have heard no detail on how that investment will be directed or implemented, or how many people it is designed to support.

There are also concerns in the disability sector about whether that money will be used for Disability Confident, because of the lack of transparency about how Disability Confident is measured, and whether it is just a means of attracting employers to events or is genuinely about focusing on job outcomes for disabled people. I hope that the Minister will have the opportunity today to set out how the Government intend to develop the support programme and what it will look like in practice.

We know that disabled people trying to find, enter and stay in work face a number of barriers. They can include a lack of suitable and vacant jobs, poor attitudes from potential employers towards hiring disabled people and a lack of appropriate support to enter the workplace. However, current back-to-work support for disabled people simply is not delivering. The work capability assessment does not accurately determine the support that disabled people need; it is more of a medically focused assessment process and does not relate to disabled people’s real experience of trying to find work and, in particular, stay in work. Specialist support to assist with finding and staying in work is essential, and the amendment is designed to help secure that.

There is also concern that existing employment support is misfiring and is ineffective. To provide some detail, job outcomes for disabled people on the Work programme are only 7.7% for those entering employment support allowance, and just 3.9% for those moving from incapacity benefit on to employment support allowance. Furthermore, the specialist Work Choice programme is ineffectively targeted and offers support only to a very small number of disabled people, and I should say that the figures I have just used are the Department’s own figures. A recent evaluation of the Work programme by the Department found that disabled people were more likely than other groups to say they had not received support, which is surprising given that there is meant to be dedicated support. Those who had received support were less likely to say that it was helpful.

Both programmes come to an end in 2017, and the amendment gives the Minister another opportunity to outline what support will be available in practice from then. What plans do the Government have to re-evaluate those programmes and the type of support they offer? What improvements do they have planned?

There is particular concern among disabled people and disability organisations—I refer particularly to the briefing I have received from the disability organisation Scope—about what the quantitative changes to employment and support allowance could mean in relation to conditionality. I do not think any Member would want to find a disabled person coming to their surgery having experienced sanctions, unable to access any benefit as a result of the changes and without sufficient employment support.

Written evidence to the Committee has called for employment support to be tailored to the needs of the individual, joined up with wider public services and more reflective of local labour markets. Specialist providers have the expertise to respond directly to specific barriers to work that disabled people experience. If the Minister has not already visited, I certainly recommend that she sees the Royal National Institute of Blind People’s support programme in Loughborough. Specialist employment support could include peer-to-peer sessions, interview and CV preparation, support focused on managing specific impairments, and discussing with employers how to manage different types of support in the workplace. Such support allows for more intensive and effective interventions that reflect the specific support needs of an individual.

Scope provided me with Azar’s story. Azar is 20 and recently took part in Scope’s pre-employment programme for young disabled people. Azar has cerebral palsy and told Scope that because of his disability, potential employers assumed that “he couldn’t do this and he couldn’t do that”. He knew that he wanted to work in business, so after he left college he was looking for a job, as he wanted experience to put on his CV. Having had the support of a professional mentor, he feels more confident and less worried about being judged, which has a significant and positive impact on his employability.

Job retention is another area that requires renewed focus if we are to halve the disability employment gap, and specialist employment support has a role to play in that too. Ann, a member of staff of Scope’s employment service, provides an example of how such support can help people stay in work. Ann supported a client with Asperger’s syndrome who worked in a hotel. When he got stressed and bombarded with customers, he went into his shell and ignored people. He got really upset with his own behaviour. The reasonable adjustment was for Ann, the specialist disability employment support worker, to speak to the manager and ask about making sure that the client was able to have a breather for five minutes to handle the stress. The manager was absolutely fine with that. That is a straightforward, cost-neutral, reasonable adjustment and has significant positive benefits, but requires someone who understands the health condition and is able to work with the employer.

The Government should consider personal budgets to support disabled people, so that they have greater control over the type of employment support they receive. The In Control programme had a certain measure of success, and it is a shame that it has been wrapped up. There is considerable international evidence that personal budgets can empower disabled people to have increased choice and control over their career by removing bureaucracy from the employment support system and creating greater flexibility in the type of employment support available. They also serve to help smooth the transition for disabled people moving from unemployment into work, they and should link up with Access to Work support. If people were able to carry through the Access to Work package, it would smooth the system significantly.

Finally, the devolution agenda provides a big opportunity to do far more to ensure that disabled people are connected to growth and employment opportunities in their local area. There are precedents for funding focused on increasing employment rates for specific groups of people, such as the Youth Contract and the Youth Contract for cities. There is the potential for regions to be incentivised to put disabled people at the heart of their growth strategies. That could be done by creating specialist employment support programmes, bringing together local employers or looking at wider strategies. I therefore urge the Government to ensure as a minimum that regulations made under the Bill give due consideration to types of support that will ensure that many more disabled people are better supported in the workplace.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman back to his place, and I am glad to see that he has been able to return.

The SNP fully oppose the proposals within clauses 13 and 14. We are glad to see Labour making some headway and supporting us in our opposition. To reduce the rate of employment and support allowance to that of jobseeker’s allowance is completely immoral and makes absolutely no sense to us. The Government clearly did not consider when formulating the policy the fact that those who have been placed in the ESA work-related activity group have been independently found unfit to work. Otherwise they would not seek to reduce the support for those who are ill or have disabilities or more complex needs to the same level as support for fit-for-work claimants, such as those receiving JSA.

ESA claimants have always received a higher rate than those on JSA, because they typically take longer to move back into work, as they face additional barriers. Paul Farmer, chief executive of Mind, expressed the same concern when he said:

“Almost 60% of people on JSA move off the benefit within 6 months, while almost 60% of people in the WRAG need this support for at least two years. It is unrealistic to expect people to survive on £73 a week for this length of time.”

Returning to employment is not an option for many people with disabilities. Those unable to work should receive an income replacement benefit to ensure a fair income.

The Minister needs to understand that those who live with an illness or condition are typically worse off than those who do not. A Parkinson’s UK survey in 2007 found that just under a third of working-age people with Parkinson’s were in any form of employment. It further reported that many younger people with Parkinson’s who cannot sustain work because of their condition relied on incapacity benefit for their income or part of their income.

I cite again the case of my constituent with Parkinson’s who came to see me after having been sanctioned. I wrote to the Department about his sanction and raised it with the Secretary of State on the Floor of the House and by letter. He was sanctioned and taken to a tribunal, although the Department’s own legislation said that the process should be done in a paper-based format, as people with degenerative diseases are not always fit to present themselves. The Department was not even aware of its own policy, and said so in an email to me. I found that particularly disturbing, and I continue to pursue that case.

The Scottish National party is extremely worried about the provisions. Reducing the ESA WRAG rate from £102.15 a week to £73.10 a week from April 2017—a reduction of just under £30—will force sick people further away from getting back into work, despite the fact that the WRAG was created especially to support the ill and disabled back into work. The Conservatives’ policies are doing exactly the opposite of what they claim they want to do.

The Chancellor said in the summer Budget that it was a perverse incentive for ESA claimants to receive more than JSA claimants without getting support to return to work. He cited the reduction in the number of JSA claimants by 700,000 since 2010 while incapacity benefit claimants have fallen by only 90,000, and said that 61,000 of those in the WRAG want to work. We do not dispute that, and we agree that more support must be put in place to assist those with illnesses and disabilities back into work. However, we do not understand the Government’s rationale for reducing the payments for the ESA WRAG or universal credit. How will that incentivise more people to work? Perhaps the Minister can help us.

The Disability Benefits Consortium has told us that more than 493,000 disabled people are assessed as not being fit for work, 248,000 of them with mental and behavioural problems, 86,000 with diseases of the musculoskeletal system and connective tissue and 8,000 with progressive and incurable conditions such as Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis and other serious and degenerative diseases. The DBC has said that those living with long-term conditions are struggling to get by on the current rate of ESA. For the Government to cut it further will surely put them further into poverty and deprivation. The Conservative manifesto committed to halving the disability employment gap, but it is my party’s contention that the reduction in the ESA WRAG component will in fact present more barriers to those with disabilities who are trying to get back to work.

Mencap has said that households that include a disabled person will be hit much harder than others. Given that a third of them already live below the poverty line, the additional reduction in income will have a devastating impact on those most in need of Government support. The Government’s own figures already show that over the past year, the number of disabled people living in poverty has increased by 300,000. I am astonished that the Minister can even consider taking a small additional payment away from the ill and disabled when they are struggling to deal with the challenges of their condition.

Given the Government’s own admission that the vast majority of people in the WRAG want to work, they should be protecting any benefit that will help break down the barriers to work. The SNP has been sent here to defend our people from further hardship, to protect them from poverty and to secure a fair, just and sustainable pathway to prosperity. We will not find that in this Bill. I call on Members on both sides of the Committee to vote with the SNP to remove these unscrupulous plans.

--- Later in debate ---

It is fair to say that we also recognise that it is difficult to find the best way to improve support for people with health conditions and disabilities. It is challenging, and I do not think that any hon. Member in this room has all the answers to that challenge. Of course, as a result, varying types of support are required to help these people move into work. That is why the Department offers a flexible range of support to help people get back into work, ranging from personal individual support from Jobcentre Plus work coaches to Work Choice, Access to Work, and the flexible support fund. In the autumn we intend to put out further details on support, and that will be informed by discussions with stakeholders. That will also build on the evidence coming out of a range of pilots that the DWP is already testing.

[Neil Coyle]

It is welcome to know that more big detail is emerging, but it is disappointing that that detail is not before the Committee, which I think would be right and proper. We had a case this morning where, similarly, there was not enough detail to make scrutiny possible. Will the Minister commit to a meeting with representatives of groups including the Disability Benefits Consortium, Scope and RNIB, to make sure that their views are genuinely taken into account?

[Priti Patel]

I would be delighted to do exactly that. I would like to emphasise for the benefit of the whole Committee that that is exactly how good policy is developed. It is developed through meeting stakeholders and hearing of their experiences, and of how we can put into implementation the practical support that people need. We need to understand how we can do that through our own current delivery mechanisms, whether through jobcentres or our work coaches or through some of our schemes.

I would also like to touch on the commissioning strategy that the Department holds right now. That includes how the Department approaches the market when looking at flexibilities for support provision, and also how the marketplace itself can develop to include stakeholders and disability organisations to provide that support. Setting out guidance on this in particular is impractical, and obviously the commissioning strategy strikes the right balance in terms of engagement and developing the right options.

[Neil Coyle]

Will those discussions, debates, consultations and engagement include specific proposals around the Work programme and Work Choice reform?

[Priti Patel]

The hon. Gentleman has raised a valid point. Obviously, with the 2017 date which he touched on coming up, this is about evolving the policy and looking at future provision, as well as existing provision. That is an ongoing discussion that we are having with stakeholders right now in the Department. The hon. Gentleman also spoke about devolution. Devolution provides new opportunities for further integration, and localisation that is based on collaboration, rather than setting out prescriptive approaches. As a Government, we are great believers that that is the appropriate way forward. That reflects the reality that local authorities have a good understanding of these issues, and they work with DWP and also with third parties and stakeholders at a local level.

The hon. Gentleman will be fully aware of many of the pilots that are taking place. Obviously we have the Working Well pilot in Greater Manchester with the combined authority, which is an excellent example of how support is being provided at a local level. There is much more in terms of other pilots in particular. By the time that pilot is rolled out it will cover not just individuals with disabilities, but also up to 50,000 individuals with a range of health conditions, to support them. That will involve a budget of in excess of £100 million. This includes something like £36 million from the combined authority alone.

--- Later in debate ---

[Priti Patel]

I will not give way. That is the purpose of the claimant commitment. Secondly, ESA was introduced back in 2008—as I am sure the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury will remember, although I was not a Member of Parliament then—and was dubbed a radical reform package. The work-related activity component at the time was intended to act as an incentive to encourage people to participate in employment. Clearly, we know that that has not happened. We are therefore reforming our approach with DWP, through our jobcentres and work coaches, to support individuals to get back into work.

Specifically with ESA, the hon. Lady will be aware that the Secretary of State gave a speech just before the conference recess about how we can do more. It is absolutely right that we do more to support people with health and mental health conditions, and work is already taking place around the country. With that will come more co-location of health services with our jobcentres, as well as more support and signposting in our jobcentres.

To return to my point about sanctions, I have no idea what the Labour policy on sanctions is, but they exist as a reasonable requirement through the claimant commitment. Our jobcentre staff work with claimants to ensure that they are being supported in the right way to get into employment. Our work coaches help them and signpost them through universal jobmatch. They get the support required. That is part of the claimant commitment, which is made abundantly clear to the claimant when they come into the jobcentre in the first place.

[Neil Coyle]

On the reasonableness of sanctions, I have had a mum come into my surgery who was sanctioned for not attending an appointment at Jobcentre Plus because she was taking her daughter to hospital. Does the Minister conclude that that is reasonable?

When employment and support allowance was introduced, there were specific expectations about the number of people who would end up in the support group, in the work-related activity group and on jobseeker’s allowance. Those potentialities were not hit for some time, due to problems with the work capability assessment. Given that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has been discussing completely overhauling the work capability assessment, which was in our manifesto in May, is the Minister seriously suggesting that the system is perfect, and—

[The Chair]

Order. I think that is probably enough for one intervention.

--- Later in debate ---

I touched on devolution, some of the pilots that are taking place and some of the wide-ranging support we have, such as personalisation pathfinders and many of the supports that are already taking place in our jobcentres, as well as funding from the European social fund, that are helping with more localised provision. We believe that they are the appropriate ways forward in terms of providing the right level of support for individuals with health conditions. To come back to my earlier point, we intend to set out further details on support in the autumn, which will be informed by discussions and work with, and evidence from, stakeholders. I urge the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark to withdraw the amendment.

[Neil Coyle]

It is important to reiterate the concerns about the language on who is protected and who is not. We had some discussion about that before conference recess. The sheet in front of me says that 244,250 people with mental and behavioural disorders in the work-related activity group will be directly affected. Disabled people have already experienced an impact—not that group specifically but more generally. Some 440,000 disabled people have to pay the bedroom tax or spare room subsidy and benefit rates have been frozen, including the vast majority of employment and support allowance benefit paid to disabled people. We have also had the change to disability living allowance. It is very frustrating to hear Ministers continue to claim that disabled people have been protected when they clearly have not.

Having made that significant point, it would be interesting to see in more detail the concrete proposals that the Government are introducing. I am glad they are committed to working with stakeholders, although I am a little bit concerned, having been a co-chair of the Disability Benefits Consortium policy group for some time and not really having been consulted or engaged by them. I hope the relationship has improved under this Minister and that those discussions are constructive. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

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[Priti Patel]

I will not give way.

It is very easy for Labour Members to claim that the measure is about taking money away. It is about providing the right kind of support for people with health conditions and disabilities. It may not be the appropriate answer that the hon. Lady wants to hear. The Government are committed to supporting more employment. Of course, this is a binary argument for her. We are supporting claimants with a limited capability for work through our employment provisions, our jobcentres and the specialist disability employment advisers.

[Neil Coyle]

Will the Minister give way?

[Priti Patel]

I will not give way. At the same time, we are working with employers through the schemes that we have, Access to Work being one example.

Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Coyle]

On a point of order, Mr Streeter. Before the conference recess, the Minister committed to provide additional information to my office about the monitoring of disabled people’s carers. I was reminded of that when the same offer was made just now. I do not believe I have received anything yet. Is there an update on when that will be provided?

[The Chair]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising that point of order with the Committee. Would the Minister like to respond?

--- Later in debate ---

[Emily Thornberry]

May I comment briefly on the SNP’s amendments? Although I applaud the sentiment behind them, and if they are pressed to a vote, the hon. Lady can rely on our support, I want to put on record that it is not completely unconditional. The reality of life within jobcentres, unfortunately—it should not be like this—is that jobcentres have to be told that their job is to get particular groups of people into work. A constituent of mine came to see me and said, “My son is four. I would like to go back to work, but when I go to the jobcentre they don’t give me any help.” We should not need to choose between the extreme proposed by the Government and nothing. It should be possible to make jobcentres know that their primary job is not just to get people off jobseeker’s allowance at all costs and to sort out the statistics as best they can, but to ensure that they are sufficiently adaptable and flexible to help people who genuinely want to work to get into work, even if it means not fulfilling a target.

There will be people—particularly single women—who want help at an early stage, perhaps because their mum lives next door and they have good childcare, or perhaps because they have a skill level that will allow them to get work relatively easily with a bit of help from the jobcentre. They should not feel that the jobcentre believes it should not look after them because they are not part of the targets. I put in that caveat because the real world is not black and white; there are people in between who may be lost by the amendments. However, that is not to say that in principle we will not support the SNP’s amendments.

[Neil Coyle]

I rise to speak to amendment 140, which is about the intention expressed by the Government, including the Prime Minister, to protect disabled people. We have heard how the changes to disability living allowance and employment support allowance will affect disabled people directly. The amendment is designed to protect the parents of disabled children aged three or four.

The reason for tabling the amendment is that parents and carers of disabled children aged three or four would be allocated to the all work-related requirements group if the Bill is enacted as drafted, which would require them to look for and be available for work. It would be useful if the Minister could indicate whether that is an intentional provision, or whether it is incidental or accidental. I do not think I am going to get that acknowledgement at this stage.

There is an exemption for parents of children in receipt of the highest or middle rates of the care component of disability living allowance, but it will exempt only a very small number of parents, as few receive that benefit at that level. As many Members know, it is getting harder for parents to access disability living allowance. I certainly have experience of that from my postbag and surgeries.

Many parents of disabled children choose to care for their child, and they best know their child’s needs and abilities. Those who wish to work often come up against the lack of appropriate childcare for disabled children, as we discussed earlier. As the shadow Minister indicated, it is also more expensive to access tailored childcare for disabled children.

The rationale for the amendment is based on recent policy changes that require carers of children aged five to make a return to work. However, the Bill equates parents of children aged three and parents of children aged five. There are obviously significant differences between the two ages, which means that the Government’s assumption risks harming families, not least because five-year-olds are in primary education.

There is a read-across to the Childcare Bill, in which the Government are proposing to offer 30 hours of free childcare to working parents. That could help, but the Childcare Bill as drafted does not properly account for the barriers faced by families with disabled children when accessing childcare provision. For the same reason that we discussed this morning, it would be useful to know how the Government intend to identify that parents genuinely have access to 30 hours of appropriate childcare for a disabled child. They cannot just put a statutory obligation on a council to provide it, because we know it is not being delivered.

Many providers under the three and four-year-old offer are not able to meet the needs of children with more complex needs, and the additional cost of childcare for disabled children can limit the number of hours that can actually be accessed. The combination of those issues could severely compromise a parent’s ability to meet the conditions of looking for work, which would not be taken into account as the Bill is drafted. An offer of support is not the same as appropriate support genuinely being available in practice. This concern has been expressed by disability organisations in written and other evidence submitted to the Committee. Currently, carers of children in receipt of the highest or middle rate care component of DLA are exempted from the all work-related requirements group. The amendment would extend that protection.

Department for Work and Pensions figures suggest that there are currently just 53,000 claimants of DLA for children aged nought to five years. If the amendment is blocked, many carers of severely disabled children could be subject to conditions and sanctions, as we have already discussed, despite the fact that it can take a considerable amount of time for parents and carers of disabled children to be able to access disability living allowance. I do not think that it is the intention of Conservative MPs in particular to end up with the parent of a disabled youngster turning up in their surgery who is not able to access appropriate childcare, has work-related conditions in place and ends up being sanctioned, and then has absolutely nothing coming in. I hope that that is not the intention, and I do not believe that it is. I hope that the Government will consider this amendment.

My last point is that amendment 140 should be accepted to reflect the fact that a disabled child’s needs and the specific level of support that they require may be very hard to identify under the age of five. DLA is not a brilliant basis for the exemption of carers. It is not sufficient. It can take months or years to access disability living allowance—indeed, the Prime Minister has spoken of his own personal battle when trying to apply for disability living allowance for his son. Personal experiences should be taken into consideration when pressing ahead with this legislation. The amendment proposes using additional criteria to determine whether someone is caring for a severely disabled child which go beyond a sole reliance on claiming DLA at a certain level. These include statements of special educational needs, which a small number of children under five receive; replacement education, health and care plans; those defined as children in need; and those who meet the Equality Act definition of disabled.

[Priti Patel]

Clearly, this Government believe that there is much more that can be done to support all parents, including lone parents with young children, to prepare for and look for work. I will come on to amendment 140 and some of the points which have just been raised in a minute. Universal credit offers significant work incentives over the current system of benefits, with the structure of UC designed to encourage and reward work. As universal credit is paid both in and out of work, many of the barriers to work start to be removed. Claimants with young children in particular can try suitable work depending on their own circumstances in the knowledge that their universal credit claim will not automatically close and, importantly, that their payments are adjusted systematically to take account of their earnings.

The support that we provide through work coaches should help to make parents much more ready to move into employment—that, of course, is the point of work coaches and of Jobcentre Plus in particular. Jobcentre Plus plays a vital role in supporting parents to find work via the core framework and interventions with a dedicated work coach, helping those furthest from the labour market to return or move closer to it. Work coaches deliver a personalised service to best meet the needs of the parent in relation to the local labour market conditions. That is why the Government are investing in extra work coach support. Work coaches will be able to build a relationship with individuals, ensuring that work-related requirements are tailored to their particular circumstances and capability, and are compatible with their childcare responsibilities. Work coaches also provide a gateway to access much of the other support that is available, which includes skills training and sector-based work academies, as well as financial support through the flexible support fund, in order to remove some of the barriers.

The findings from the “Universal Credit at work” report shows that those on universal credit are working more compared with those on jobseeker’s allowance. Of course, universal credit encourages claimants to find work, to increase their earnings and support themselves. I know childcare has been touched upon in our broader debates today, but it is worth mentioning that parents of disadvantaged two-year-olds in particular are able to access to free early-years education. Parents may also have access to jobcentre funding to enable them to undertake the work preparation that is necessary while their children are at that young age.

--- Later in debate ---

Access to childcare, including the flexibility and support available to parents claiming universal credit, is obviously an important component. We will ensure, of course, that all work-related requirements are tailored to individual circumstances and compatible with the childcare responsibilities.

[Neil Coyle]

The Minister says that individual circumstances will be taken into account. Will that include monitoring or testing to see that a parent is genuinely able to get access to the level of childcare that she says should be available?

[Priti Patel]

I will come on to that when I speak to amendment 140. If I do not answer that specific point, perhaps the hon. Gentleman will intervene on me.

Carers provide invaluable support for relatives, partners or friends who through whatever circumstances are ill or disabled. The carer element within universal credit is to support carers on a low income who provide care for 35 hours or more each week for a severely disabled person. That does not replace carer’s allowance, which will continue to exist as a separate benefit outside universal credit.

Importantly, for those with less substantial caring responsibilities, some work-related conditions may apply; but existing legislation is clear about how those should be limited. Requirements for each claimant will depend on their individual capability, circumstances and caring responsibilities. That comes back to my point that the expectation will be based purely on the individual’s personal circumstances. Most responsible carers of a disabled child aged three or four will not be subject to the conditionality associated with the clause. Responsible carers who receive the carer element will fall into the “no conditionality” group in universal credit, which means that no work-related conditions will be applied.

For carers who are not entitled to the carer element, different levels of conditionality will apply. Some who do not qualify for it will be placed in the “no conditionality” group. These include full-time carers of a severely disabled person who are unable to receive the carer element because they are not the main carer, and carers of more than one severely disabled person whose cumulative caring responsibilities mean that it would be unreasonable to impose conditions on them. Also it would be unreasonable to place requirements on a claimant who is a carer of a severely disabled person for at least 35 hours, or to do so where the care giver is responsible for a severely disabled person awaiting an assessment for a severe disability benefit.

I reiterate that it is important that there should be flexibility for other carers who do not fall into the “no-conditionality” group, because caring responsibilities may change from day to day; I think we all recognise that. Where there is a disabled child in the household, that will be factored into the decision making and the appropriate level of requirements. Any requirements will be tailored.

The hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark specifically mentioned childcare provision for parents of disabled children. He also mentioned the Childcare Bill, which is the responsibility not of my Department but of the Department for Education. More information will follow about the delivery of the childcare element, in particular the 15-hour and 30-hour delivery measures for local provision. We want to ensure that provision is in place for the parents of disabled children. We have to work with the providers on the ground, which is something that the Department for Education is doing now, working with stakeholders and consulting. That is part of a wide-ranging piece of work. The hon. Gentleman is right to raise this point, however, and I will I pick it up with my colleagues in the Department for Education to ensure that that is featured in and factored into their discussions with stakeholders.

[Neil Coyle]

Is the Minister suggesting that the Government’s expectation is that parents of a disabled child who are unable to access 30 hours of childcare would not be subject to the conditionality that might be imposed were such support to be in place?

[Priti Patel]

First, we have to ensure that the provision is in place, which is part of the wider childcare offering, and work is taking place through the Childcare Bill, including on delivery. Importantly, this is about working with the parents of disabled children. We have to look at individual cases to ensure that support is tailored for them. There should never be a one-size-fits-all policy—we all recognise that—so through Jobcentre Plus and our work coaches we will look at all the relevant circumstances of the individuals.

I urge the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock to withdraw the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Priti Patel]

The hon. Lady has covered a number of points, but the one that I want to focus on is that it is right for us to support women into work. As the Committee must recognise, we have more women in work than ever before—the rate is now 68.8%. The purpose behind the Government’s changes is support for lone parents in particular to get into work without being prescriptive and in particular by recognising that our work-focused interview approach, with our work coach support, is a key enabler of the policy and, importantly, is investing in the quality of learning and development through our jobcentres. That will give lone parents in particular the right level of support and guidance that they require to find work.

Work coaches, as part of their role and when in discussion with claimants, and lone parents in particular, at the work-focused interviews, will identify the barriers to work and, importantly, the type of support required. That means taking into account the individual circumstances of lone parents and responsible carers, including care and responsibility for their child or children, and in particular identifying the type of work-related requirements possible as a result. The aim is to develop a relationship in which claimants can discuss their issues and circumstances as they emerge. People who have children recognise that circumstances change all the time. Helping to ensure that requirements remain reasonable and appropriate is our priority.

Furthermore, the parents should feel that they are involved in the development of the requirements, which of course are recorded and noted in the claimant commitment, by contributing the steps that they think will give them the best chances of finding work. We will of course only ever have requirements—based around work coaches and jobcentres—that are reasonable in light of the appropriate circumstances.

We recognise that where people are in training the requirements are tailored around that. Training itself can be part of work preparation requirements, so of course it will be relevant to the claimant commitment that is being established as well. It is also important to recognise that it would not be appropriate—and would be difficult and wrong—to set out a uniform level of support that would meet the needs of individuals. Universal credit has been constructed in a way that promotes discretion, tailoring and flexibility. The existing legislation provides work coaches with the flexibility to tailor, limit or even temporarily lift requirements that are entirely based on personal circumstances. The range of circumstances is broad. We will ensure that any work-related requirements are tailored to the individual’s circumstances and, importantly, are compatible with childcare responsibilities.

[Neil Coyle]

The Minister says that the Department will ensure that the requirements on individuals are flexible and sensitive. In our surgeries and case loads we are already seeing circumstances where that has not been the case to date. The Minister suggests that such individuals should not be experiencing sanctions or disincentives, but what additional safeguards or measures will be put in place to ensure that that does not happen?

[Priti Patel]

It is not about the guidance that goes out one day to jobcentres or work coaches. We are routinely working with our work coaches and our jobcentres to make sure that they are supporting individuals through the advice that goes down to them, through the guidance that is sent out, through what is being distributed from the Department and also through training. That training is absolutely vital, in particular with regards to work coaches. I emphasise that point. I know that comments have been made about jobcentres not supporting people to get into work, but I would argue against that. I have sat in on many interviews myself, including with lone parents, and I have seen commitments that are tailored to that individual’s circumstances. In fact, I was in Edinburgh two weeks ago; I go to jobcentres on a weekly, very regular basis. It is absolutely the right approach that the work coaches have the freedom and flexibility to support the individual, and also to recognise the labour market conditions locally.

[Neil Coyle]

The Minister is very generous in giving way. One of the concerns expressed by Jobcentre Plus staff—certainly those in my own constituency and those I have been chatting to elsewhere—is that once an agreement is in place with an individual, very little flexibility or adviser discretion is possible in order to prevent the imposition of a sanction where something cannot be met. The example I gave earlier has been resolved, and I am very grateful for the Minister’s offer to intervene. In that case, because there was an agreed number of job interviews that had to be attended, when the mother ended up having to go to hospital, she became subject to sanction. There is a point in the process where an individual becomes subject to sanction for not being able to meet an agreed requirement due to unforeseen circumstances, not due to deliberate non-compliance with a plan. That is where the challenge lies.

[Priti Patel]

The hon. Gentleman is right to raise that, and obviously that is a highly relevant and pertinent point. This is why we should not undermine the autonomy of those local decision makers by putting things in binding statutory guidance. They need to be supported, and the Department needs to support them to offer that flexibility as well. We all recognise that personal circumstances and individual circumstances change. I am pleased to hear that the case that the hon. Gentleman mentioned has been resolved, but of course we want to avoid such situations in the first instance. We can only achieve that if work coaches work with the individual claimant and understand their circumstances. Obviously, the claimant needs to be very up front and say that their circumstances are changing and explain what is going on, because life is not one-size-fits-all for everybody and obviously circumstances change.

--- Later in debate ---

[Priti Patel]

I disagree with the hon. Lady’s latter point. Importantly, the labour market changes. Vacancies come up every day of the week. It is relevant to the individual, their circumstances and the ability for them to choose what they feel is best for them. They might want to be in training, which might be, for example, 30 minutes or an hour or require some travel. There might be a work placement or a work experience opportunity. It is right with the labour market flexibilities that we have those flexibilities in place. On the point raised by the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, if an individual is unable to meet the requirements—this relates to the local flexibilities—they would come into the jobcentre to explain why that is the case and that is therefore fed into the process.

[Neil Coyle]

The challenge is that the flexibility does not exist now for individual advisers because of the system imposed towards the end of the previous Parliament. Individual advisers’ discretion was removed in order to have a more automated system that has developed into the experience of more sanctions. Is the Minister suggesting that that process will be reviewed or changed? Without that, the good intention will not be delivered in practice.

[Priti Patel]

Work coaches have the flexibility in universal credit to respond to individual circumstances and are using their discretion—

--- Later in debate ---

[Emily Thornberry]

We have begun to discuss some of the specific barriers faced by single parents who are looking for work, but we have not yet had a detailed discussion of what I, and I am sure most people, would consider to be the most significant barrier of all: childcare. It has been said that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and in many ways it is also true that there is no such thing as free childcare. Getting the universal entitlement to 15 hours, which in theory is available to all parents of children aged three and four, is often not quite as easy as it sounds. For a start, it usually is not free.

It is widely acknowledged that the difference between the rate at which the Government subsidise childcare providers and the actual cost of delivering care is substantial; substantial enough that charging for some services is the only way that providers can stay afloat. Parents know that that can happen in a range of different ways. Some are hit by hidden charges, such as being asked to pay for the cost of food or activities, while others—we have this situation in my constituency—are told that they cannot access their free hours unless they take additional paid hours as well, often at considerable cost.

The Lords Select Committee on Affordable Childcare completed an inquiry last year having heard extensive evidence. It concluded that

“parents are subsidising themselves, or other parents, in order to benefit from the Government’s flagship early education policy.”

I ask the Department for Work and Pensions yet again to look beyond the rhetoric at the evidence. The House of Lords Select Committee looked at this matter and said that it is serious.

In some cases, parents have even been told that the free 15 hours can be accessed only as part of a full-time placement. Full-time normally means 50 hours, which accounts for the early morning drop-off and early evening pick-up that is generally necessary for parents who work full time. To put in perspective the scale of the financial commitment that this could mean for parents, I looked at my local authority area in order to get a proper example. Childcare costs in Islington are among the highest in the country. A full-time place in a private nursery will set a parent back more than £18,000 a year, and what if you have two children? Let me tell Ministers that not all the low-income single parents from the Market estate have that kind of money to spare. Even if they worked full-time for the London living wage, fees at that level would exceed their pre-tax salary.

I wonder if I can save the Minister some time by anticipating some of the arguments that she is likely to rehearse in response to my concerns.

[Neil Coyle]

May I bring my hon. Friend back to a point about zero-hours contracts? There is a significant concern that some of the people affected will be forced to take work that does not have a consistent or guaranteed income, and that in itself acts as a barrier to being able to access childcare.

--- Later in debate ---

[Emily Thornberry]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point.

I want to talk about the Government’s proposal to extend free childcare to 30 hours a week for some parents, and I will explain why I just do not buy it. To begin with, let me raise the most obvious problem with the proposal. It sounds wonderful, but how on earth do the Government intend to deliver it? How are they going to deliver 30 hours a week? There is the Childcare Bill—all four pages of it—and it offers no clue. I have looked at it—it can be read in a moment. It is the most extraordinary piece of legislation. To be quite honest, it is the Tory party manifesto on green paper. It does not have any detail to it. It does not answer any of the questions that people are understandably asking. A number of pertinent questions were put on Second Reading by Peers from all sides of the House, and they referred to it repeatedly as a “skeleton”. They are very polite in the House of Lords.

That view was shared by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which expressed the concern in its scathing report on the Bill that

“it contains virtually nothing of substance beyond the vague ‘mission statement’ in clause 1(1)”,

and concluded:

“The remarkable imbalance between the provision that appears in the Bill itself and what is to be left to regulations, and the scarcity of explanation in the memorandum, has led us to question whether Members will be in a position to contribute meaningfully to debates at Committee Stage and Report Stage.”

Leaving aside what that says about the Conservatives’ attitude to democracy, it also says a great deal about how serious they are. They seek to force lone parents back into work, on the promise that at some stage there will be sufficient childcare for them to be able to work, but they cannot even produce a Childcare Bill that means anything, or give us any details that mean anything. As I said, they are very polite in the Lords, and perhaps we should follow their example, but we do not. We say that it is absolute nonsense. It is yet another example of empty rhetoric. The Government are playing with people’s lives, and they should be held to account for it.

Likewise, we find ourselves debating the same promise now. Members of this Committee find ourselves ill prepared to judge the consequences of the proposals in clause 15, because we simply do not know whether the promised 30 hours of free childcare will be available when people go to work. It is immediately obvious when we start to scratch the surface of the 30 hours commitment that the policy is not funded to any meaningful level.

So we have a Bill that does not mean anything. Now let us look at the funding. The Government figures suggest, and the Minister has repeated in this debate—with a straight face, for which I commend her—that extending the entitlement to 30 hours of free childcare a week will cost £365 million in the first year, unless I am wrong. It seems that that is still the position. I do not know how that figure was calculated. We have a man from the Treasury here—the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury—and I would be pleased to sit down and listen to his explanation of how all that childcare will be provided for £365 million a year. [Interruption.] For the record, no explanation is forthcoming.

Interestingly, that figure differs substantially from the estimate made by the Conservative party of my party’s quite similar policy proposal in 2013. When we said that we wanted to extend free childcare to 25 hours a week for working families, what did the Childcare Minister, the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr Gyimah), estimate our costs would be? He did not say £365 million; he did not say £665 million; he did not say £1 billion. He said that it would cost £1.6 billion, yet the Minister has tried to persuade us today that producing 30 hours a week of childcare for so many children will cost a mere £365 million a year through her non-existent Bill. Please excuse us if we are somewhat sceptical of the Government’s promises that they can produce that childcare.

Although we can have a laugh about it, mothers of four-year-olds on the Market estate will be threatened with sanctions unless they are actively looking for work and get a job, on the promise that there will be childcare. There will not be childcare that is affordable for them on the wages that they can expect given the type of work that is available for them. That is the reality of life, and that is why policies should be made on the basis of evidence and not rhetoric. The truth is hard.

[Neil Coyle]

It is worse than empty rhetoric; it is empty legislation. We have seen the same thing in social care legislation. The Government committed to providing additional support for families desperately in need of social care, but when it came to implementation, there were delays. The difference in these circumstances is that many families will be left without sufficient support but with mandatory requirements and sanctions.

[The Chair]

Order. Let us try to stay on this Bill, on amendment 108 to clause 15.

--- Later in debate ---

[Priti Patel]

I will not give way. That is expected to help about 500,000 additional families at a cost of £350 million a year—that cost is specific to the universal credit childcare element.

On top of that, parents will have the option to claim tax-free childcare, which will help up to 1.8 million families, who will be able to benefit by up to £2,000 per child per year, or £4,000 for disabled children. We have also secured additional funding to allow jobcentre work coaches to address barriers to employment and to support moves into work. The extra funding may be used in a variety of ways to pay for travel and childcare, to enable parents, such as lone parents, to undertake training, attend interviews or start work.

We recognise that we have to continue to do more, but—just to put this on the record—this Government has a proud record on childcare provision, in particular in the previous Parliament, when we increased the start-up grants to increase childcare supply in the marketplace. That totalled up to £2 million available to people to set up new childcare businesses. We now have about 32,000 good or outstanding childcare minders who have been supported and are now eligible through early education funding. We have made it simpler and easier for schools and childcare providers to work together to increase the amount of childcare available on school sites. Last week, we made the announcement of wraparound childcare. We have also legislated for the creation of childminder agencies, which will improve the support available for childminders and parents. We have simplified the framework so that nurseries may expand more easily.

On top of that, the Government are spending in excess of £5 billion in the childcare market, which is important first to increase the sufficiency of supply, and secondly to focus on quality. The quality continues to improve, with 85% of providers declared good or outstanding by Ofsted, which compares with 70% in 2010. The qualifications of early-years staff continued to improve in 2014. The National Day Nurseries Association reported that 88% of settings that it surveyed employed a graduate, up from 80%, and that 87% of staff had good A-level equivalent qualifications. Now we have the early-years foundation stage profile results for 2013-14, which show an 8 percentage point increase in the number of children reaching a good level of development by the age of five. That also applies to children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

It is fair to say, therefore, that we are not embarrassed at all. It is pretty sad to hear the Opposition, although they are entitled to their views, portray the Government as not doing enough on childcare and not supporting working families on childcare—

[Neil Coyle]

rose—

[Priti Patel]

I will not give way. The Opposition are completely wrong. The hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury mentioned the childcare taskforce, which has been set up by the Prime Minister across the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education. We are working with a wide variety of stakeholders, including childcare providers and the third sector—they are members of the taskforce. The Childcare Bill places a statutory duty on local authorities to publish information on childcare and other services available to parents locally, ensuring transparency for parents.

Importantly, funding was mentioned. Of course, funding continues to be one of the areas where more work is taking place in Government. A funding consultation is taking place, led by the Department for Education. Of course, we are working with the DFE. We made great progress in the last Parliament to increase parental employment, particularly with lone parents. The number of children in workless households has decreased.

Obviously, there is more we can do. We will continue to ensure that we provide affordable and appropriate childcare in the right settings, and that the availability is there. The Government firmly believe that we need to do more rather than less to support parents with young children to prepare for work. Childcare is one of those vital strands. Ultimately, it helps to improve children’s life chances as well. The clauses, together with our substantial investment in childcare, support that ambition. That is why I urge hon. Members to withdraw the amendment.

[Emily Thornberry]

I thank the Minister for her response. If I had been allowed to intervene, I would have asked her whether she could help us on a specific point, which is probably important. The commitment is to childcare once parents are working, but for many parents, particularly if we are talking about parents of a very young child, to be able to find work, it may well be that children will need to have childcare—from the 20 hours, or whatever the commitment is—so that their parents can apply for jobs, go to interviews, fill in CVs and do voluntary work to prepare for work. Will there be any childcare available for parents who are looking for work, particularly when their children are young? If she is not able to answer me today, could she write to me about that, because I am not clear from her earlier answer whether she covered that matter or not?

[Neil Coyle]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, particularly in light of the Minister’s refusal to give way to her. That was a shame, because some of the points that the Minister made are very welcome. What was frustrating was that there was no figure for the number of children. If £365 million is being provided, it would be helpful if the Government could indicate how many children that is expected to support.

[Emily Thornberry]

There might be another question. Although the Minister has raised tax-free childcare, it probably needs to be pointed out at some stage—perhaps I might point it out now—that tax-free childcare is available only for people not claiming tax credits. It is not of any benefit to people on low incomes.

In light of the response that the Government have given us, we will not withdraw the amendment, and I wish to put it to a vote.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Colleagues, we now come to a little bit of a vote-fest. I have a note that amendments 140, 63, 131, 132 and 133 can now be put in that order. Is anyone aware of any other amendments that they are looking to press to a Division?

[Neil Coyle]

rose—

[The Chair]

You cannot speak again, I am afraid; just move it formally.

Amendment proposed: 140, in clause 15, page 14, line 38, at end insert—

“(d) in section 22(1) after “section” insert “, except if the claimant is the responsible carer of a disabled child aged 3 or 4.

(1B) The Secretary of State must lay regulations determining what a disabled child is for the purpose of this section and may include, but will not be limited to a child—

(a) in receipt of an Education, Health and Care Plan,

(b) in receipt of a Statement of Special Educational Needs,

(c) identified by their local authority as having special educational needs,

(d) with child in need status,

(e) meeting the definition of disabled under the Equality Act 2010.”—(Neil Coyle.)

To exempt a responsible carer of a disabled child aged 3 or 4 from all work-related requirements.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Vara]

There is an impact assessment on the Government website and the hon. Lady is welcome to view it. She talks about evidence and I would have thought that record levels of employment for youth, women and the country as a whole is pretty strong evidence.

[Neil Coyle]

It is interesting that the Minister has absolute confidence in economic stability, but it is not shared by everyone. House prices are rising and falling at different rates, and different job opportunities are available, in different parts of the country. May I be the first to offer the Minister the moniker of Minister for repossessions?

[Mr Vara]

Sorry, I missed the hon. Gentleman’s last point. He was obviously trying to be witty and clever, but I am afraid that it was far too witty for this time of day.

[Neil Coyle]

It has been a long day. My point is that the Minister will become known as the Minister for repossessions as a result of a retrograde step. Labour changed that policy in government to ensure that, having contributed to benefits through national insurance, people had support if and when they needed it. The Government are taking that support away and the Minister will become known as the Minister for repossessions.

[Mr Vara]

May I gently say to the hon. Gentleman, who is new to the House of Commons, that, if he wishes to survive, he will have to get used to being called a lot of things?

We intend to ensure that, through the regulations, we cover financial arrangements alternative to traditional mortgages. The amendments will also ensure that claimants who live in non-traditional homes, such as houseboats or caravans, will also be offered a loan. It is important that support is available to protect the homes of all individuals, regardless of the type of accommodation they occupy. The amendments ensure that the technical detail about calculating the amount of a person’s liabilities to make owner-occupier payments, and the maximum amount of those liabilities that can be met with a loan, will be set out in regulations.

The amendments ensure that regulations made under clause 16 requiring security for a loan may make provision for situations where there are alternative financial arrangements for a home, and ensure that the security can be taken in respect of a legal or beneficial interest in the person’s home.

Clause 17 allows for the detailed framework within which loans may be made to be put in place by regulations. That will allow for the tactical operation of support for mortgage-interest loans, which will provide fairness for taxpayers along with protection from repossession for claimants. It will also continue the current administrative arrangements that mean that payments of support for mortgage interest go directly to the mortgage lender.

The amendments to clause 17 are consequential to the amendments to clause 16. They replace the description of the payments for which loans may be made with a reference to owner-occupier payments, which will be defined in regulations. They will ensure that the loan scheme will be available to eligible claimants who have acquired their home through alternative finance arrangements rather than through a traditional mortgage.

Amendment 120 seeks to clarify what requirements a person will have to meet before receiving a loan. It ensures that regulations under the clause may make provision about entering into agreements with persons receiving loans. The Secretary of State will be able to specify terms in the agreement that he thinks fit, subject to any terms set out in the regulations. That will ensure that the regulations do not have to include every term that is needed in the loan agreement.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Sixth sitting)

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Thursday 17th September 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend share the concern that some of the Government agenda is being driven by think-tanks that have done none of their own research on these issues and were unable to provide evidence to back up the assertions that they made in the witness sessions?

May I also say how much I enjoyed my lunch?

[Emily Thornberry]

Yes, there was an opportunity when we heard evidence. We asked the Government for evidence. We asked them again and again. I have tabled several parliamentary questions and have not had particularly good answers. We have asked questions in the House about their justification and evidence, and we got nowhere. If there is an opportunity, it would be great finally to hear from the think-tanks, which I know the Government are close to—at least some of them—and for them to come forward and give us the evidence on which the policy is based.

I was struck that, while hyperbole was in good measure, we had no evidence. We had people coming in again and again telling us the occasional story. It is as though the policy is based on the one family that was found living in Westminster with the flatscreen television and a Mercedes outside, or whatever the extraordinary example was. That is so removed from the reality of the day-to-day lives of people who are affected today by previous benefit caps and will be affected even more by further benefit caps.

The best way to make policy is on the basis of evidence. For that reason, the Labour party has made it clear what our position now is. We oppose the Tories’ reduction in the benefit cap, so we will therefore be joining the Scottish Nationalists on amendments 25 and 26. We will review Labour policy with regard to the principle of the benefit cap and we will look at evidence. It is right to say that Labour Members who represent London constituencies feel that week after week in our surgeries we see an awful lot of evidence of the adverse effect of the benefit cap and how it does not provide an incentive to get people into work, how it does not save money, and how, more than anything else, it is not fair.

We want in the next few months to put forward a good body of evidence to show, one way or the other, whether a benefit cap is right on any basis. For that reason, although we oppose the lowering of the benefit cap now, we have committed ourselves to looking carefully into the evidence, and we encourage people, including the Government, to come forward and share the evidence with us. If the Government want to give us the evidence on which they are basing this appalling policy—this cruel and nasty policy—I would be very glad to hear it and very glad to read it.

More than political whimsy is needed. If we must have a cap, we should at least make it clear that there should be an objective benchmark by which the level should be determined. I will therefore press amendment 71 to a vote.

--- Later in debate ---

[Priti Patel]

Those in receipt of the support component of employment and support allowance are, of course, exempt from the cap. The Secretary of State has recently spoken about ESA and the additional support that can be given to individuals with particular health conditions. The Government are working on that right now, completely outside of this Bill.

[Neil Coyle]

On the point about disabled people being protected, there is an exemption for the support group—fair enough—but 440,000 disabled people are directly affected by the bedroom tax. The personal independence payment and disability living allowance changes will mean that, according to Government estimates, some 600,000 disabled people will lose out directly. Access to Work is supporting fewer disabled people, and there are fewer working-age disabled people in work as a proportion of the overall number than in 2010. The benefits freeze has directly affected even those in the support group of employment and support allowance, so it is incorrect to keep claiming that disabled people have been protected.

[Priti Patel]

Actually, we have been very clear about safeguards for vulnerable people. [Interruption.] We have. Perhaps this is just a fault line between our two political parties, as the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury has already said, and the Opposition intend to vote against this come what may, but we made it very clear that protecting the vulnerable is one of the key principles of our welfare reforms. [Interruption.] I appreciate that Opposition Members want to comment from a sedentary position, but there seems to be a huge area of difference between our two parties. One of the key principles of our welfare reforms is that we will put in place safeguards to protect the most vulnerable. There will be a range of measures, including discretionary housing payments, but it is wrong just to assume that we are deliberately not looking after vulnerable people when we clearly are.

--- Later in debate ---

[Priti Patel]

Absolutely not. I do not accept that at all. As we saw yesterday with the employment figures, over the last year, employment has increased by 400,000 and 90% of those jobs are full-time jobs.

The Bill reduces the cap, as we are discussing. Again, it comes back to the principles. Reducing the levels of the cap will reinforce a message that work pays. It brings a degree of fairness but supports the principles of work, and it works alongside what the Government are doing to support individuals to get into work as well.

The new tiered levels also recognise that housing constitutes one of the biggest costs for households. In London, housing benefit awards are, on average, £3,000 a year more than elsewhere in the country. Even in the south-east, as the average housing costs are around only half that of London, we believe that it is right for the cap to take into account those differences. We believe that the new tiered level for the cap will go further to achieve our aims of increasing the incentives to work.

The Bill also removes the current link between the level of the cap and average earnings. Back in 2011, the benefit cap was a new concept. At that time, with no benchmark, average earnings provided a basis by which to set the cap in order to achieve its aim, but times have moved on. We have evaluated the impacts of the cap, and the cap has been proven to work, as I mentioned, in terms of supporting people back into work.

[Neil Coyle]

Will the Minister give some evidence to back up her assertion that it has worked? What were the measures of success? How many people have moved into work? What would success look like for the Government if this measure was to go forward as it is in the Bill?

[Priti Patel]

I understand that the evaluation has been published, and since its introduction, more than 35,000 households who had previously been capped have moved off the cap. As I have said, the evaluation shows that the cap is working, with households 41% more likely to enter work than similar households who were just below the benefit cap. This is of course about the behavioural effects, but we have to, and should, put it into the context of incentivising work and supporting people to help them get into work, which is clearly part of what the Government are doing through their welfare reform agenda.

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[Neil Coyle]

In my borough of Southwark, initially 500 or so households were meant to be affected, with a large number of them in Peckham. The local authority intervened to support some of those families to make decisions. Some people did go to work. I would like to see that figure of 35,000 broken down a bit further, because other people were supported on to benefits to provide the exemption from the cap. There is a mixed picture and I am sure the Minister did not want to lead more people on. However, I also wanted to intervene on the local authority side—

[The Chair]

Order. We might have a long afternoon in front of us and it will be even longer if interventions are long. I say to you, take the opportunity to speak from the Back Benches before the Minister has responded. I would ask for interventions—

[Neil Coyle]

rose—

[The Chair]

No. You have had the opportunity. The Minister is now responding to the debate, and she has been very generous with interventions.

[Hannah Bardell]

It is fairly simple. The Bill and the changes to the benefit cap are about taking people to the brink and pushing them over the edge into even greater poverty and, worst of all, pushing people who are severely disabled, sick and vulnerable, not to mention hundreds of thousands of children, into even greater poverty.

Our amendments would mitigate the effects of the Government’s reckless blanket cap to benefits and of the changes in the Government’s austerity measures, which are being imposed on Scottish people who did not even vote for this Government. In Scotland, we are already spending £300 million to mitigate the black hole that Westminster created with the bedroom tax. I wonder how the Minister can justify saying that she is protecting some of the most vulnerable and disabled people when even the severe disablement allowance is itself included in the cap. I can only assume that she will be supporting our amendment 34.

Ultimately, lone parents, women and the most vulnerable will be pushed into even greater poverty, which could lead many into further debt, or vulnerable people into developing mental health issues and problems, spiralling into greater problems and leaving them out of work for longer. Surely those are the very people whom we should be supporting and giving the greatest help to, rather than pushing them further over the edge and putting greater pressure on the third sector and charities. I urge all Members to support our amendments.

[Neil Coyle]

rose—

[The Chair]

Order. The hon. Gentleman is a new Member, so I am being generous. Back Benchers have the opportunity to speak before I call the Minister, so in future he should indicate at that point. He may make a small contribution now, before we have the vote.

[Neil Coyle]

Thank you, Mr Owen. I apologise for getting things in the wrong order. I also apologise to the Minister if my intervention was too long. I am grateful for opportunities to intervene.

The point that I was making was to do with the 35,000 figure mentioned by the Minister. When the benefit cap was approaching, many local authorities across the country rolled out additional support to individuals whom they suspected would be directly affected by the cap. In the borough of Southwark, that included support to identify whether some individuals might qualify for other benefits that would exempt them from the cap. It is therefore not accurate to suggest that 35,000 people moved into work if, for example, someone in a household was moved into the employment support allowance support group or identified as meeting the disability living allowance requirements. The Minister suggested that 35,000 moved into work, but the Government might actually have created a perverse incentive and welfare dependency, which they talked a lot about trying to avoid.



My second point was about local authority resources. It is not free for local government to provide that level of additional support to individuals directly affected. Is the Minister suggesting that there will be more support for local authorities as the measures in the Bill approach implementation to ensure that they can meet the demand of individuals affected to support them to move home, so they may reduce some of their costs, to move into work or to move on to different benefits? Will there be another jump in the level of payments made to organisations such as Citizens Advice by Government in order to meet the jump in demand? For example, in Southwark 40% more people were seeking advice, reassurance and information from Citizens Advice on how to avoid some of the measures proposed by the Government.

Those are some of the concerns that I am trying to get across. I apologise again if I expressed them at the wrong point.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

--- Later in debate ---

The Government regularly, and have today, cited statistics to the effect that of the 40,000 households affected by the benefit, 41% no longer are and have entered work. There are two ways of looking at that. The first and most obvious is to note that the substantial majority of people affected by the cap have not been able to find work of enough hours to exempt them from it. The majority of people, despite the benefit cap, have not been able to find work. If it is such a great incentive, why has it not worked on more than half of people affected by it? The reason is obviously because it reflects the simple truth that the cap overwhelmingly applies to people who are recognised within the benefits system itself as being unable to work.

[Neil Coyle]

One reason, as my hon. Friend has said, for people potentially being unable to work or to work for significant hours is caring responsibilities. She specifically mentioned carer’s allowance. Is she aware that to qualify for carer’s allowance, people need to be providing a minimum of 35 hours of support a week to a disabled person or other loved one? That is a definition that the Department for Work and Pensions’ own advice suggests is a “substantial” level of support to another individual.

[Emily Thornberry]

So someone is supposed to give a substantial level of support to another person and yet also be working sufficiently to be exempted from the benefit cap. These are the sort of people who we rely on to keep our society going—frankly, most of them are likely to be women. Those people are carers for those who would otherwise be relying on the state to do it at a much greater cost. Instead recognising the role of such people, they are being penalised under draconian legislation.

[Neil Coyle]

If carers were to stop providing 35 hours of support or more a week, local authorities would potentially be asked to step in to provide some of that support to an individual. We already know what the Government’s agenda is for local authorities—what is has been for the past five years—but the average cost for care home placement is upwards of £600 a week. There could be a new cost to the Government of getting this policy wrong, particularly for carers.

[Emily Thornberry]

My hon. Friend puts it very well. If only we had a Government that listened. In fact, the most recent statistical release from the Department included, for the first time, a breakdown of capped households by benefit claimed. By far the largest proportion—49%—were claiming income support. In the vast majority of cases those are single mothers who are unable to work because childcare is neither available nor affordable. It is clear from the evidence that we heard last week that a lack of suitable childcare remains a substantial barrier to lone parents seeking work.

In Islington in my borough the cost of a part-time nursery place is £235 a week—one of the highest in the country and more than 30% higher than the London average. It is not just cost that is the problem here. The jobs that are likely to be available to many of the mothers in my constituency who want to find work are disproportionately likely to be short-notice working, often at unsociable hours—in other words, the times when it is most difficult to find childcare.

The Government’s promise of raising the number of free hours of childcare to 30 hours a week is welcome, but we have been down this road before. During oral evidence we heard concerns to the effect that the shortfall between the reimbursement rate and the actual costs would make it uneconomical for many childcare providers to continue their operations. Neera Sharma stated:

“The Pre-school Learning Alliance has said that, on average, the cost of childcare is £4.53 an hour; the Government contributes, on average, £3.88. When the childcare offer is doubled, nurseries could operate at a loss of £661 per child per year, so there are going to be quite significant issues for providers.”—[Official Report, Welfare Reform and Work Public Bill Committee, 10 September 2015; c. 22, Q32.]

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[The Chair]

Do any Back Benchers wish to speak?

[Neil Coyle]

Briefly Mr Owen. Thank you for your generosity earlier and for preventing me from being put in the same position again.

The derogatory comments about the succinctness of my hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury demonstrate the big difference between the Government and the Opposition. These are incredibly important issues that affect thousands of people, and they go directly to the root of the matter. The Government claim to represent working people, but many thousands of the people affected are in work. The Government are taking away fundamental parts of the support system that helps those on low incomes who are trying to work, move on and do the right thing, to use the Government’s terminology. The Government are also undermining people’s opportunity to live in central London constituencies such as mine.

I want to pre-empt something that I suspect the Minister might say about discretionary housing payments. Rather than just focusing on the few local authorities that pass back, or have passed back, some of their unspent discretionary housing payments, perhaps we could discuss the total spend of councils on discretionary housing payments, including those, such as mine, that spend more than they are provided by central Government.

[Priti Patel]

The amendments would introduce a new series of exemptions from the benefit cap. Largely, they would provide exemptions for the households that find it most difficult to enter work, for people who may be unable to get a job or for those who are not required to be available for work and to take up employment. I will shortly address why I do not agree with introducing the proposed additional exemptions, but I remind Members that the cap sets out the strong principle that there is a maximum level of out-of-work benefits that the Government will pay to each household. The Government have always accepted that there should be some exemptions from the benefit cap.

I will briefly recap the current exemptions. To incentivise work, the cap does not apply to households in receipt of working tax credits. To recognise the extra costs that disability can bring, households that include a member who is in receipt of attendance allowance, disability living allowance, personal independence payment or the support component of employment and support allowance are exempt. War widows and widowers are also exempt, as I am sure all Members recognise.

[Neil Coyle]

Has any assessment been made of the impact of the benefit cap and other changes on new applications for the supports just listed by the Minister that provide an exemption from the cap?

[Priti Patel]

I will have to come back to the hon. Gentleman on that point.

The exemptions best support the cap’s aims of increasing incentives to work and promoting fairness while ensuring that the vulnerable remain supported. The welfare reforms that we have discussed thus far in Committee are about transforming life chances and promoting fairness and opportunity.

Amendment 104 would introduce three new exemptions from the benefit cap. The explanatory statement that accompanied the amendment explains that its purpose is:

“To provide that the benefit cap does not apply to benefit claimants who will find it most difficult to enter work.”

The first exemption that the amendment would introduce is for persons

“responsible for the care of a child aged below 2”.

A blanket description that couples with children are those who find it most difficult to enter work is inappropriate. The vast majority of capped households who have found work include parents who have managed to balance their caring responsibilities with work, as millions of working households already do. By going out to work, parents are helping to improve their children’s life chances and are showing them the importance of a strong work ethic, reinforcing the principle that work is the best way out of poverty.

Turning to lone parents with young children, at whom I think this amendment is most likely addressed, we believe that work is the best route out of poverty for households. Children can have their life chances and opportunities damaged by living in households in which no one has worked for years and in which no one considers work as an option. Lone parents need only enter work at 16 hours a week to become eligible for working tax credits and so become exempt from the cap.

We already provide support to parents for the cost of childcare, which we are extending to help working parents further. The 30 hours of free childcare is just one measure, but there are many others, not least tax-free childcare, which will provide a great deal of support, in particular for families on universal credit, who will be able to claim back 70% of childcare costs. On funding for childcare rates, a Government funding review is currently under way, led by the Department for Education, so more is taking place in this area. Parents who receive help with childcare costs through working tax credits are exempt from the cap and childcare costs paid through UC are excluded from the cap. Since the cap was introduced in April 2013, nearly 8,500 lone parents have moved into work and started claiming working tax credits. In 2014, around 1.25 million lone parents were in employment in the UK.

The second exemption that the amendment would introduce is for people in receipt of carer’s allowance in respect of someone who is in receipt of disability living allowance, personal independence payment or attendance allowance with whom they are not living. We all acknowledge the important role that carers provide, but we do not accept that carers are unable to work. Although seeking work is not a condition for receiving carer’s allowance, many carers are nevertheless able to and combine work with caring responsibilities. Figures from February this year show that around 760,000 working-age claimants were receiving carer’s allowance. Of those, around 75,000 reported that they were doing work at some point while making their claim. It would therefore be inappropriate to introduce an exemption specifically on the grounds that somebody is in receipt of carer’s allowance. However, the vast majority—94%—of households in receipt of carer’s allowance who have a benefit income above the cap level are exempt from the cap, mainly because the person they care for is in the same household and is in receipt of an exempting disability-related benefit.

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Division 22

Ayes: 5

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Labour: 3
Scottish National Party: 2

Noes: 10

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Conservative: 9

[Neil Coyle]

I beg to move amendment 94, in clause  8, page 10, line 30, at end insert—

“(aa) the impact of the benefit cap on disabled persons and carers.”

This amendment requires the Secretary of State to consider the impact of the benefit cap on disabled people, and carers, when reviewing the level of the benefit cap.

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 73, in clause 8, page 10, line 31, leave out paragraph (b) and insert—

“(b) The relationship between the level of the cap and average earnings, and

(c) Regional variations in the cost of housing.”

To remove the provision allowing the Secretary of State to set the level of the benefit cap by reference to “any other matters [he] considers relevant” and to instead require that the cap should be set by reference to average earnings and regional variations to adjust for differences in the cost of housing.

Amendment 13, in clause 8, page 10, line 31, at end insert—

“(c) an annual report made by the Social Security Advisory Committee on the level of the benefit cap.”

To require the Secretary of State to take into account an annual report by the Social Security Advisory Committee on the level of the benefit cap when undertaking his review of the benefit cap.

Amendment 14, in clause 8, page 10, line 31, at end insert—

“(3A) The report made by the Social Security Advisory Committee on the level of benefit cap, under subsection 3c, must include an assessment of the impact of the benefit cap on the Discretionary Housing Payments Funds administered by local authorities.”

To require the Social Security Advisory Committee’s annual report on the level of the benefit cap to include an assessment of the impact of the benefit cap on Discretionary Housing Payments.

Amendment 105, in clause 8, page 10, line 31, at end insert—

“(c) any reports on the impact of the benefit cap on the wellbeing of children made by the:

(i) Children’s Commissioners for England;

(ii) Children’s Commissioner for Wales;

(iii) Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People; and

(iv) Commissioner for Children and Young People, Northern Ireland, following the introduction of the benefit cap in Northern Ireland.”

To require the Secretary of State, when reviewing the level of the benefit cap, to take into account any reports made by the Children’s Commissioners for England, Scotland, Wales on the impact of the benefit cap on the wellbeing of children. Should the benefit cap be introduced in Northern Ireland the Secretary of State shall also be required to take account of any similar reports made by the Children’s Commissioner for Northern Ireland. This amendment does not require the Children’s Commissioners to make such report but does require the Secretary of State to consider any such reports if they are made.

[Neil Coyle]

I rise to speak to amendment 94, which is in my name; the consequential amendment 13, which focuses on the Social Security Advisory Committee and its reports; amendment 14, on the effect on discretionary housing payments; and amendment 105 on reports by the Children’s Commissioners. We support the amendments.

Amendment 94 would require the Secretary of State to assess the impact on disabled people and their carers when considering the cap threshold. This comes back to the earlier discussion about the fault-line between the parties on this issue. Our party believes that disabled people and carers should be protected, and that, as a minimum, the Government should be monitoring the impact of their policies on these significantly disadvantaged groups. Our policy comes from an evidence base, and it reflects the fact that, over the past few years, whether deliberately or by accident, the Government have penalised disabled people and carers.

I should like to give a personal example relating to the amendment before going into detail. My mum has schizophrenia. She is fortunate now, in that she is over state retirement age and so exempt, and has adequate treatment that sustains her mental health. Had this Government’s policy been in place before she was adequately treated, before adequate schizophrenia treatment was available, she might have been forced into homelessness or into being sectioned, at considerable additional cost to the state. She would have been trying to manage the side effects of poor medication, which at times caused vomiting so severe it contributed to loss of teeth. As that was happening, if this policy had been in place, she would also have been losing income and being made even more vulnerable. That is why the Government’s proposals are so dangerous and difficult for so many disabled people and their carers and families.

In the last five years, the Government have been either unaware of or uncaring about the cumulative effects of their policies on disabled people and carers. A massive grassroots movement of disabled people in particular and carers as well has put forward the WOW petition asking the Government to assess the impact of their policies on disabled people and carers. The petition secured 104,818 supporters and resulted in a debate in the House. During the debate, a previous Minister undertook to carry out several actions, including asking officials in the Department for Work and Pensions to work closely with Dr Simon Duffy of the Centre for Welfare Reform to make the independent cumulative impact assessment carried out by him as accurate as possible.

Unfortunately, since that debate, the Government have not worked with Dr Duffy to ensure that. The amendment would help address some of the frustration that disabled people and carers feel about the impact of Government policy and about not being taken more seriously. The Government’s Social Security Advisory Committee concluded that the Government could and should provide an analysis of the cumulative impact of their welfare reforms on disabled people, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research recommended that Her Majesty’s Treasury

“incorporates breakdowns of the cumulative impact of tax and social security measures according to protected characteristics into its distributional analysis as a matter of course.”

The amendment would support the Government in meeting that requirement. I should add that the WOW petition is up and running again in light of the Government’s inaction, despite previous commitments, to ensure that policies are better assessed for their impact on disabled people and carers.

During the last Parliament, we saw the rise of the Hardest Hit campaign, a combination of disability, carer and advice and welfare organisations working to ensure that the Government focus better on the impact of their policies. The campaign remains active and concerned about the impact of continued Government policy and reductions in support to disabled people and carers. The Government have continued to claim that disabled people are protected. That is untrue, and increasingly untrue. Of particular concern is the fact that, from October this year, the number of people on disability living allowance being pushed through personal independence payments assessments will increase. As the Government’s objective is to remove support from about 600,000 disabled people, it will mean that those disabled people will no longer be exempt from the benefit cap, adding additional weight to the importance of the amendment.

Witnesses to the Committee, including Parkinson’s UK, have suggested monitoring the impact of further changes and have said it would be welcome. I am grateful to the Disability Benefits Consortium for supporting my contribution to this debate. The DBC consists of about 60 different disability advice and welfare organisations active on and expert in these issues. It has no ulterior motive other than ensuring that the welfare system works adequately to support disabled people and carers.

The Disability Benefits Consortium has said in briefings to the Committee:

“A third of disabled people live below the poverty line, around 3.7 million people. Furthermore, DWP figures published in June show the number of disabled people living in poverty has increased by 2% over the last year equating to a further 300,000 disabled people living in poverty.”

The benefit cap, combined with freezes and cuts to ESA for those in the work-related activity group, will reduce disabled people’s incomes significantly. It needs measuring. There are additional costs to Government of getting the policy wrong, and that also needs measuring. The impact on disabled people and carers is not only a human one. The Government must be responsible and consider that. Has a policy had the desired effect? For example, has it had consequences for local authority spending, NHS spending or mental health spending?

In addition, while those in receipt of the support component of employment and support allowance are exempt from the cap, those in the WRAG are not, which we discussed earlier today. That means that about half a million disabled people are affected, and I hope that Members are clear about who is affected and who we are talking about in these groups.

The statistics on these people are from February this year and they are the Department’s own. I will not list them all, Chair; I know that we are tight for time. But 3,420 of these people have infectious and parasitic diseases. That is who we are talking about. In addition, 770 people have diseases of the blood and blood-forming organs, and certain diseases involving the immune mechanism; 244,000 have mental and behavioural disorders, which include learning disabilities; 26,000 have diseases of the nervous system; 2,990 have diseases of the eye and adnexa, which I am sure everyone knows about; 8,110 have diseases of the respiratory system; 2,930 have diseases of the skin and subcutaneous system; and 22,000 have injury, poisoning and certain other consequences or external causes. They are the disabled people who this Government policy would affect directly; they are not protected under the Government’s current policy. All that the amendment seeks to do is to ensure that the impact on those people is at least measured and monitored.

The current impact assessment suggests that a new lower-tiered cap has been designed to strengthen work incentives for those on benefits. The Government have yet to provide evidence to back up the claim that cutting the benefits that disabled people receive will incentivise them to work.

The Minister suggested in Tuesday’s discussions that there would be additional measures. We would welcome knowing what additional measures are being considered to reassure disabled people, their organisations and their carers that the Government are focusing on their concerns.

The majority of disabled people want to work, but they face substantial barriers, including attitudinal barriers from employers and wider society. We discussed the figures the other day; 48% of working-age disabled people are in work, but only about 10% of those with learning disabilities and 5% of those with significant mental health conditions, such as schizophrenia, are in work.

I will just give a quick example. The impact assessment provides no detail about the impact of lowering the cap on disabled people who are not in receipt of DLA or PIP. That point was made by the National AIDS Trust and HIV Scotland in their briefing for this specific amendment. Amendment 94 would address this issue, and I hope that it will be welcomed by all members of the Committee.

I come to my final comments, Chair. Scope has provided analysis of the estimated higher costs of living with a disability. Baroness Campbell of Surbiton has made the point that the additional costs that she incurs are for things such as coffee, to make sure that her carers and support workers can have a cup of coffee, as well as things such as loo roll and carpet, and costs to cover wear and tear as people sit down on her sofa. Those are additional costs that disabled people have, which go well beyond the perception of disability costs as the cost of a wheelchair or medication.

I hope that hon. Members will have the Scope research in their minds when they consider the high costs of disabled people, as well as the higher incidence of poverty that already exists among disabled people, and the incidence of low income among disabled people. Low income is a direct result of not being able to work full-time hours.

In ensuring that these measures do not disadvantage disabled people further, it would be worth the Government at least describing how they believe that they are meeting their responsibilities under the Equality Act not to disadvantage these disabled people further. A failure to monitor or impact-assess this policy would be an acknowledgement that the Government know that disabled people and their carers will be made explicitly worse off by their measures.

[Emily Thornberry]

If one looks at clause 8 in the round, it is about the review of the benefit cap. It says:

“The Secretary of State must at least once in each Parliament review the sums specified”

and:

“The Secretary of State may, at any other time the Secretary of State considers appropriate, review the sums specified…to determine whether it is appropriate to increase or decrease any one or more of those sums.”

In deciding when to review, at some random time that he thinks appropriate, the Secretary of State can consider “other matters” he sees as “relevant”. That seems to give him absolute carte blanche to do what he likes with the benefit cap, whenever he likes and for whatever reason he likes. Does the Minister wish to give us some idea of what other matters the Secretary of State might consider relevant, what he might think appropriate or when he might decide to review the benefit cap?

--- Later in debate ---

I will conclude on the amendments by reiterating that any review of a reduction in cap levels would be subject to a regulation passed under the affirmative procedure. Therefore, Parliament would have the opportunity to debate any revisions of the cap, providing further checks and balances in the process. I remind the Committee that the benefit cap is a key part of wider welfare reforms, so there is extensive debate on welfare reform. The revised cap levels are being set to create the work incentive that we have spoken about. The clause as drafted provides a better approach than that in the amendments and will allow for any future level of the cap to be set at an appropriate level. I ask the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark to withdraw the amendment.

[Neil Coyle]

In light of the Minister’s commitment to provide more information, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Amendment proposed: 73, in clause 8, page 10, line 31, leave out paragraph (b) and insert—

“(b) The relationship between the level of the cap and average earnings, and

(c) Regional variations in the cost of housing.”—(Emily Thornberry.)

To remove the provision allowing the Secretary of State to set the level of the benefit cap by reference to “any other matters [he] considers relevant” and to instead require that the cap should be set by reference to average earnings and regional variations to adjust for differences in the cost of housing.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

--- Later in debate ---

[Emily Thornberry]

The principle that we have such difficulties with in relation to clauses 9 and 10 can be encapsulated quite simply. For years, benefits have gone in attendance with need. The idea is that the welfare state should be a safety net, that it should be there for those who need it and that we should look first at need. I am not saying that we should have limitless amounts of benefits, but is important that those who are the most vulnerable are assisted.

Much has been said about the popularity of the measures, but if we look at public opinion, in a recent poll 88% of people upheld this British value: it is important to have a benefits system to provide a safety net to anyone who needs it. The clauses not only freeze social security benefits for a year; they do it for four years and they do it from now. We do not know what the state of our economy will be like in four years’ time. We do not know to what extent there may be inflation and who will be affected in what way. I will be brief because I am going to rely on the good sense of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which stated:

“While this will make a significant contribution to progress with eliminating the deficit (assuming inflation returns to the target level), it is likely to have a serious detrimental impact upon working-age households reliant upon state support to top-up their income”.

It is serious, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation recommends:

“Retention of the annual review of benefit levels to allow the Chancellor to link strong economic performance with the maintenance of living standards at the bottom end of the income spectrum”.

If the Government really mean that no one should be left behind and that we are all in it together, we should all be in it together. If the economy picks up, why would those on benefits be four years behind? It is a simple point. They talk about fairness. Here is an opportunity to do something about it. The Chancellor should continue to have a flexible approach to uprating benefits to offset increased costs, particularly for essential goods and services. There is great concern about that.

The argument is that the welfare spend has got out of control and that we need to get back to a more sustainable type of welfare spending. Again, I rely on the Child Poverty Action Group’s excellent briefing, which points out what we all know: that in 1980 working-age welfare spending accounted for 8% of national spending, whereas now it is 13%. However, analysis by the Office for Budget Responsibility questions whether spending on social security is in fact increasing at an unsustainable rate. As the evidence shows, spending on welfare as a percentage of GDP remained reasonably steady until 2008. The OBR finds that the largest contribution to the increase since them was the uprating of state pensions, rather than working-age welfare spending.

In case anybody did not know this, the poor are getting poorer. With this freezing of benefits for four years, they will continue to get poorer. We need to go into this with our eyes open. Government Members should not support the clause without allowing an annual review, so that we can see what is fair. Are we prepared to leave the poorest and most marginalised behind, while the rest of the economy does or does not do well? We are against these two clauses.

[Neil Coyle]

Amendment 95 and 96 are in my name. In the interests of time, I will be as brief as possible. I hope there will be an opportunity to come back to these issues on Report if my questions are not answered. Fundamentally, this comes back to the same issue. Disabled people are directly affected by this measure—in particular, by ESA. This is about the full component, not just the £30 support group component. The full ESA payment needs to be taken into consideration, and we have concerns about those who are directly affected. The real question is about the Conservative manifesto commitment. Page 28 of the manifesto states:

“We will freeze working age benefits for two years from April 2016, with exemptions for disability and pensioner benefits”.

The amendments would help to ensure that that manifesto commitment is delivered. I hope to come back to this issue on Report if it is not dealt with sooner.

[The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Damian Hinds)]

Things have accelerated, Mr Owen.

It is a pleasure to respond to this concatenated set of amendments. As these are probably the last words that will be said in this Committee before we break for the party conferences, I want to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston and the right hon. Member for East Ham, who is my cloakroom neighbour. They are both impassioned campaigners whose dedication and intentions can never be doubted. They will be very much missed from this Committee. Of course, we warmly welcome the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury to her new position.

This has been a full debate on a range of important issues. In responding to the amendments, I will reiterate the rationale behind our proposed changes and set out why we are not persuaded that the amendments should be accepted. However, before I do so, I want to recap the purpose of the Bill and in particular clauses 9 and 10.

The Bill seeks to move this country from a low-wage, high-tax and high-welfare society, to a higher-wage, lower-tax and less welfare-reliant one. That means ensuring that work always pays and focusing support on those on the very lowest incomes. Crucially, it means ensuring that the system is fair to those who pay for it, as well as those who benefit from it. Combined with the national living wage and the changes to the income tax personal allowance, the summer Budget ensured that a typical family working full time on the national living wage will be better off by the end of the Parliament, with eight out of 10 working households better off by 2017-18.

The Bill builds on this Government’s achievements in delivering for working people, whether that is the 1,000 jobs created every day—2 million since 2010—the 2.9% growth in wages this year, a 9% increase in total hours worked since 2010, or the fact that, according to the OBR, living standards are projected to be higher in 2015 than in any previous year. These clauses, which freeze the main rates of working-age benefits, child benefit and the majority of tax credits, are a central element of the Bill and are key to this Government’s ambition of putting welfare on a fairer and more sustainable footing. The exemptions for benefits, which help with the additional costs of disability, ensure that we continue to protect the most vulnerable.

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Without the freeze, deeper cuts would be needed elsewhere. The Government have a clear mandate to reduce spending by £12 billion. The amendments would be a rejection of that mandate and of the will of the public. Those considering supporting the amendments would need to be clear on where those extra savings might come from, whether from departmental budgets or from deeper cuts to other benefits. Those who support the amendments also need to consider fairness to those who pay for the system. Since the financial crisis began in 2008, average weekly earnings have risen by 12%, whereas most working-age, out-of-work benefits, such as jobseeker’s allowance, have risen by 21% or more.

[Neil Coyle]

I have one quick point about those who contribute. Some of the benefits that we are discussing, employment support allowance in particular, are paid to those who contributed to the system when they have been able to work. It is deeply unfair and unjust to suggest that this is somehow about protecting those who work and do the right thing when the very people that we seek to support have contributed and have then developed health conditions.

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that people in receipt of a number of benefits will have contributed to the system. It remains the case that we fund benefits out of current contributions. It remains the case that we have a budget deficit of 5% of national income. It remains the case that we need to get that down to start paying down the national debt. In order to do that, we need to find £12 billion of welfare savings.

The freeze has been extended to four years due to the current low-inflationary environment to ensure that it makes a significant contribution to the £12 billion reduction that I just mentioned. When originally announced as a two-year freeze, it was forecast to save £3 billion and to lead to a real-terms reduction in benefit rates of 4%. Due to the current environment, it would now save less than £1 billion. The Government have therefore extended the freeze to ensure that it generates at least the same level of savings, and more, than announced last autumn.

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[Damian Hinds]

I will be delighted to. I was explaining why what was originally a two-year freeze has been extended to a four-year freeze because of the current low-inflationary environment and the need to make the savings that form a substantial part of the £12 billion that we have been discussing.

While the Government have a clear mandate for the reforms, it is imperative that we protect the most vulnerable. We are protecting pensioners, with pension credit, the pension additions in other benefits, and the basic state pensions—they are all excluded from the freeze. We are also exempting benefits relating to the additional costs of disability, such as attendance allowance, disability living allowance, and personal independence payments. We have exempted the support group component of ESA, the limited capability for work and work-related activity component of universal credit, as well as additions and premiums in JSA, ESA and tax credits related to disability. Statutory payments, including statutory maternity, paternity and adoption pay, statutory shared parental pay and statutory sick pay are also all exempt. Those exemptions ensure that the most vulnerable in society are protected from the benefit freeze.

Let me speak directly for a moment to amendments 95 and 96, which seek to exempt disabled people from the freeze by ensuring that any of the relevant sums of working-age benefits and tax credits are increased in line with inflation, if they are claimed by a person who is disabled. In bringing forward our policy to freeze benefits and tax credits, we have been extremely mindful of the protections that we believe it is right to put in place to support the most vulnerable.

We are exempting all the benefits relating to additional costs of disability, as I just listed. Similarly, we are protecting the disability premiums and additions in working-age benefits, tax credits and pension-age benefits. The support group component in employment and support allowance and the limited capability for work and work-related activity element of universal credit are also protected. Those elements are paid to those with the most severe work-limiting health conditions in recognition of the fact that they are less likely to be able to increase their income by moving into work and may have additional needs as a result. Those are vital protections alongside the very acute need to make savings.

[Neil Coyle]

The Minister is accepting that the majority of the payment received by disabled people in the employment and support allowance group who are judged unfit to work—full stop—will not be protected. He is making the Prime Minister’s commitment to protect disabled people false. Of the payment of roughly £100 that those people would be expected to receive, £30 or so will be protected, whereas £70 will not. Will the Minister confirm that that is accurate?

[Damian Hinds]

What we have said is that those in the support group will be exempt, but not those in the work-related activity group. The main rates of working-age benefits are there to provide basic support for claimants who are not in work. Those rates are common across all claimants who receive out-of-work benefits. Introducing new higher rates of payments specifically for disabled people has the potential to discourage claimants from taking steps to get back to work where they can and would introduce significant complication into the system, leading to possible confusion for claimants.

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Lady will forgive me, I know, if we do not talk again at length about the benefit cap. We had a big debate about that in the earlier group of amendments that referred to the benefit cap. I repeat all the exemptions that are being made in the freeze—well, I am not going to repeat them all, but she heard them. There are all the exemptions that the Government are making for those specific benefits and elements of benefits that refer to the additional costs of disability.

The Government are committed to ensuring that disabled people are able to participate absolutely fully in society and have set out their ambition to halve the disability employment gap, which I think is something that Members on both sides of the Committee and the House would agree on.

[Neil Coyle]

Will the Minister give way?

[Damian Hinds]

Will the hon. Gentleman forgive me if I do not, just in the interests of time?

Most people with disabilities and health conditions want to work and we will support them to prepare them for work and to move closer to the labour market, and when they are ready, to move back into work. We believe that the freeze is a necessary and fair way of putting welfare spending on a more sustainable footing, but that it is vital to offer protection to the most vulnerable. The best way of doing that is by supporting people who can to move closer to the labour market and by continuing to protect those benefits relating to the additional costs of disability.

[Neil Coyle]

Let me try a different tack. Does the Minister expect this range of cuts to be as successful as the last set of cuts, which were projected to save billions on ESA and DLA but actually resulted in higher spending of £10 billion?

[Damian Hinds]

We are debating a group of amendments about a four-year freeze to certain benefits. Do I expect that to be successful in delivering the £3.5 billion that it is projected to? Yes, I do, and it is clearly a mathematical point about the rate of inflation and so on. We have the independent forecasts of how the economy is going to grow and of inflation, and I believe that our measure will deliver.

The Scottish National party amendments replace the freeze and the duty to review with the removal of the freeze altogether. That would remove the certainty we have about legislating directly for a freeze, and move us from the position where we have a clear plan reflecting the electoral mandate of the Government to one where the taxpayer could not be sure, year on year, as to the level of benefits.

Certainty for individuals, to help them plan ahead, is a key feature of the Government’s economic policies. It is also why we have introduced a national living wage, and pre-announced the anticipation that it will rise to £9 an hour by 2020 and the ambition to increase the tax-free personal allowance to £12,500 by the end of the decade. Legislating now to freeze for four years, along with those other measures, provides clarity to benefits recipients, giving them fair notice and the opportunity to make positive changes. Anyone supporting the amendments before us would have to spell out how they would instead give the public that certainty about the level of spend and identify where else they would make cuts.

I turn briefly to new clause 2 on the local housing allowance. The measure announced in the summer Budget to freeze local housing allowance rates for four years will contribute savings of £1 billion towards the Government’s commitment to reduce the welfare bill by the £12 billion I mentioned. It is not included in the Bill, as the Secretary of State already has the powers in primary legislation to change the way in which LHA rates are set. Those powers were included in the Welfare Reform Act 2012.

It may help, however, if I clarify how the freezing of LHA rates will work during the four-year period. The rates will still be reviewed each year and rent officers will calculate, as they have been doing previously, a rate calculated by reference to the 30th percentile value from a list of rents for properties of a given size in that area. Each list of rents must include achieved rental values from the distribution and range within each area. In line with the Government’s measure to freeze rates, they will then set the new LHA rates based on the lower of either the April 2015 rate or the 30th percentile of listed rents. The Government recognise that some areas will see particularly high increases in rents, so we have made specific provision for those areas.

Over the Parliament, 30% of the savings generated from this measure will be used to create more targeted affordability funding, building on the £140 million already distributed since 2014. Alongside that, local authorities are able to provide support to the most vulnerable claimants affected by housing benefit reform through an enhanced package of £800 million of discretionary housing payment funding, which is significantly more than was provided over the previous Parliament.

I reassure hon. Members that, alongside the LHA rates, we will continue to publish, as we have previously, the 30th percentile of market rents in each area. We believe that the freeze to the main rates of the majority of working-age benefits, child benefit and tax credits are a necessary and fair way of putting welfare spending on a more sustainable footing. I urge the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury to withdraw the amendment.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Fifth sitting)

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Thursday 17th September 2015 Public Bill Committees

The previous measures did not distinguish between those just beneath the poverty line and those at the bottom. Our new approach is focused on transforming lives through tackling the root causes of child poverty, rather than just maintaining people at marginally higher incomes. Amendments 77 and 81 seek to introduce a new statutory duty on the Government to report on children living in low-income working households and, as a consequence, to add the term “low income” to the list of terms to be defined in the annual report. That would effectively reintroduce an income-based relative poverty measure, which this Government have consistently said is flawed.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Owen. I have a couple of questions for the Minister. She dismisses the statements of the majority of witnesses who gave evidence about the importance of the income measure. What message does she think the Government are sending to those witnesses who made a robust case for ensuring that income was retained within the measurements? The professor from Bristol University made powerful point about the UK’s international standing on this issue.

Will the Minister also address the specific point about only measuring at age 16? If a 16-year-old is the target for the initial measure, they will have spent the majority of their life under a Labour Government.

[Priti Patel]

The hon. Gentleman’s intervention is timely, because I am about to come on to some of those points.

Income-based poverty measures focus only on the symptoms of child poverty while failing to tackle the root causes. Amendment 77 would take us back to when legislation pushed the Government to get families over an arbitrary income line.

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Division 7

Ayes: 3

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Labour: 3

Noes: 10

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Conservative: 9

[Neil Coyle]

I beg to move amendment 98, in clause 4, page 5, line 10, at end insert—

‘(5A) The Secretary of State must, before the end of the period of 12 months beginning with the day on which this Act is passed, publish and lay before Parliament the first life chances strategy for England.

(5B) Before the end of the period to which the strategy relates, the Secretary of State must review the strategy and publish and lay before Parliament a revised strategy.”

This ensures that the Government must produce a life chances strategy for England.

The amendment is tabled in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar, who is unable to be here because she is speaking in a debate on steel, which is a massive issue for her. She has kindly provided some speaking notes for me.

The Bill is a disgrace. It seeks to repeal some of the most noble and courageous legislation of recent years—namely, the Child Poverty Act 2010—and the ambition to end child poverty by 2020. It shows a paucity of ambition towards tackling poverty and inequality. It flies in the face of decades of thorough and internationally recognised research into the drivers of child poverty and life chances. It seeks to hide Government failure on child poverty behind narrow, cherry-picked and less relevant reporting obligations. And crucially, to which the amendment speaks, it makes no attempt to set out a route map on how the Government intend to lift the life chances of children in this country.

What is the point in reporting on progress, unless there is a strategy that sets out what the Government will do to make that progress? The amendment would ensure that the Government produce a life-chances strategy for England and publish it before Parliament.

The Committee has received a wealth of evidence from independent experts that explores all the complex drivers of child poverty, built up over decades of professional, rigorous, evidence-based research. While issues such as worklessness and educational attainment, which the Bill measures, are important, there are many complex and inter-linked drivers, the most crucial of which is financial income, which this Government refuse to measure.

We know what the drivers of child poverty are, and we know what steps should be taken to reduce it to give children the best start in life. Under the previous Labour Government, the strategies to tackle child poverty and improve children’s life chances and to ensure that every child mattered and that no one would be disadvantaged by the postcode of where they lived included the introduction of tax credits, which transformed the help available to working individuals and families, the introduction of the national minimum wage and Sure Start centres and the Every Child Matters strategy, which allowed for an holistic examination of what the state could do to combat child poverty.

That is what a strategy on child poverty and life chances would look like from a Government serious about tackling the scourge of poverty and inequality. Would a decent Government designing a strategy for tackling child poverty, or, in this case, improving life chances, include measures such as the pernicious bedroom tax, slashing tax credits for working people, when two thirds of children growing up in poverty live in families where at least one person works, reducing the benefits cap and freezing working-age benefits, the inevitable sanctioning of lone parents struggling to manage bringing up a three-year-old, or cutting Sure Start centres?

We know what works in reducing child poverty and we know what the indicators are to measure it. They include being twice as likely to live in bad housing, with significant effects on physical and mental health and educational achievement. Children in the poorest areas weigh an average of 200 grams less at birth than those born in the most affluent areas. They are more likely to die at birth or infancy, to suffer chronic illness during childhood or have a disability or long-term health condition. Children living in the most deprived areas of England have 19 fewer years of life expectancy than those in the least deprived areas.

[Emily Thornberry]

Is it my hon. Friend’s experience, as it is mine, that there are parts of the constituency where, on one side of the road, people will live five, six, seven or sometimes 10 years more than those on the other side of the road, because there is a poor estate on one side and richer people right next door who will live 10 years longer?

[Neil Coyle]

That is absolutely my experience in Bermondsey and Old Southwark. We have a massive contrast in income inequality. People who live in areas along the riverside have a higher life expectancy, and in other areas, particularly the Grange, Rotherhithe and South Bermondsey wards, about a third of children are living in poverty.

[Emily Thornberry]

If the child begins badly—if they are unhealthy and there are health inequalities when they are young—the chances of their dying earlier are obviously very much higher.

[Neil Coyle]

Absolutely. That was the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar, and it is certainly my experience of working on these issues as a councillor and now as the Member of Parliament for Bermondsey and Old Southwark.

Children from poor backgrounds are left behind at all stages of education. Without financial income, parents cannot afford the other things that contribute to life chances: school trips, decent healthy food, or a break or holiday away from home with their family. How can the Government say they are serious about improving life chances when they will stop collecting much of this data and have no evidence-based strategy to demonstrate how they intend to reach their targets?

Although the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions told the BBC’s “Today” programme in 2014 that he would meet the current targets, we know that they will not be met. This does not make the goal of ending child poverty any less achievable than it was. We know from past and international experience that, with the right timeframe and the right political will, we can eradicate child poverty. If the Government were serious, they would not remove the child poverty commitment at all. If they were serious about actually improving children’s life chances, they would not just report on them, but would set out a strategy to show how they intend to improve them. That is the aim of the amendment.

[Priti Patel]

With the amendment, the hon. Gentleman seeks to create a statutory duty on the Secretary of State to publish and lay before Parliament a life chances strategy for England and to review and revise it. Members of the Committee will recognise that the Government have made a clear commitment to publish an annual report containing data on our headline measures of children in workless households and children’s educational attainment. Those are the measures that will drive the action to make a real difference to children’s lives now and in the future.

In addition, the Government have committed to publishing a life chances strategy, which will reflect a wider set of measures on the root causes of child poverty, such as family breakdown, problems with debt, and drug and alcohol dependency. We have said that we will report on those measures annually. I therefore urge the hon. Gentleman to withdraw the amendment.

[Neil Coyle]

We have discussed some of these issues this morning. To be accused of bluster is unfortunate and insensitive when the concern is that an intervention at 16 is far too late. It is unclear exactly what the Government intend to do if they discover—shock horror!—that there are children aged 16 who are educationally disadvantaged. I am fortunate, as the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, to have a constituency where schools are outperforming the national standards, but this is still a massive concern for us. Intervening at the age of 16 is far too late.

I think that those in the sector will conclude that the Government, in failing to accept the amendment, are acknowledging that they have something to hide on the issue, but I will not force the amendment to a vote. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 4 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 5

Social Mobility Commission

[Kate Green]

I beg to move amendment 7, in clause 5, page 5, leave out lines 16 to 27 and insert—

“5 Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission: additional functions

(1) After Section 8A of the Child Poverty Act 2010 insert—”

To leave the name of the “Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission” unchanged.

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[Priti Patel]

The amendments seek to preserve the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission in its original form by retaining its name and preventing the technical change to the Child Poverty Act 2010. It would retitle the relevant schedule to reflect the commission’s name change.

Clause 5 will reform the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission to become the Social Mobility Commission. As part of the Government’s drive to improve prospects for everyone in the country, the reformed commission will ensure independent scrutiny of the process to improve and promote social mobility. The reforms to the commission will ensure a high level of independent scrutiny of progress towards a society where everyone is able to play their full part and realise their potential, regardless of their background.

The reformed commission will look beyond the Government’s action to the important role that wider civic society plays in improving social mobility. That is crucial if we as a Government are to meet our ambitions and targets of full employment, in creating 2 million more jobs, and improving the future prospects of disadvantaged children.

The commission has already demonstrated its ability to drive forward the social mobility agenda. Its fully argued annual reports and groundbreaking research on themes such as social mobility in London schools, and evaluating the non-educational barriers to the elite professions, have helped inform the debate on how to improve social mobility. Our reforms will free the commission from having to track the Government’s progress on the old, flawed child poverty targets.

[Neil Coyle]

Will the Minister give way?

[Priti Patel]

I will not give way.

Our reforms will enable the commission to invest all its resources in galvanising effort and improving social mobility. Ultimately, reforming the commission to focus on social mobility will help to ensure that all children can reach their full potential. I urge the hon. Lady to withdraw the amendment.

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[Neil Coyle]

My hon. Friend says that child poverty is flatlining, but for many families, is it not the case that absolute child poverty has risen? That is a particular concern in constituencies such as mine in inner London, and it is linked to in-work poverty.

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend is right, and I shall come to that point, because it leads into something that I shall say about the measures and targets that we use.

The summer Budget and the measures in the Bill will push more families and more children into poverty. We have not yet got an analysis of the impact of the Bill or the Budget on child poverty and on the numbers of children growing up poor. It is disappointing that the Government have not laid that impact assessment before the House. We cannot know for sure what assessment, if any, the Government have made of the impact. We do not know whether they bothered to make such an assessment. From our knowledge, expertise and understanding of what drives poverty, we can expect that the impact will be pretty adverse. We can also look to the very helpful Joseph Rowntree Foundation minimum income standards research, to which I referred earlier. It points to a particularly harsh effect on the family incomes of some particularly vulnerable groups, including single-parent families, couples with several children and families who face high housing costs.

[Kate Green]

The hon. Lady makes a very good point about the complexity of disentangling causes from consequences and about the fact that Ministers are giving the public distorting messages about what poverty actually is. Let me make this clear: only 4% of parents experience alcohol or drug addiction, and far from all those parents are parents of poor children. Of course, it is devastating for children who grow up in households where parents are addicted, but it is not the same as poverty and it certainly does not explain the 3.7 million children growing up in poverty in the UK today. As she rightly noted, family break-up affects families across the income spectrum. There will be hon. Members in this room who have experienced it in their own families. We should not conflate the two. While it is true that single parents and their children face a higher risk of poverty, there are measures that could be taken to ameliorate and address that consequence, instead of which the Government will make the position of those families worse.

[Neil Coyle]

Is there not a challenge in what the Government are attempting to suggest, in that on the one hand the Minister says their policies on tackling poverty are working but on the other suggests that the measurements, accepted by the Prime Minister when they were introduced, are flawed? Does that not expose the Government’s real agenda, which is to mask their lack of effort in tackling the low-wage economy and in-work poverty?

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend absolutely makes the case.

As we have heard this morning, it is also ridiculous to think that measuring worklessness alone could be a substitute for measuring poverty, when two thirds of poor children are in households where somebody works. We have repeatedly heard from the Conservative party that the measures are somehow flawed or insufficient, so let us go through carefully what the Child Poverty Act actually requires in relation to measurement and targets.

We know that the Institute for Fiscal Studies expects a rise in relative poverty in this Parliament, but it also expects that it is entirely possible that absolute poverty could fall. So there is a two-way street, if you like, built into the cocktail of measures that we have. We have four measures of poverty in the Child Poverty Act: relative income poverty; absolute poverty; material deprivation; and persistent poverty. That addresses some of the concerns that Government Members might rightly have about tracking only one measure. It is right that when median income is falling, relative income poverty alone is not sufficient to give a good picture of what is happening to our poorest families, although it remains important in tracking the gap that exists.

However, it is also right to recognise that we do not look only at relative income poverty in the Child Poverty Act. We look at absolute poverty, persistent poverty and, crucially, material deprivation. Material deprivation gives a real-life test of poverty and the public can engage with it, get their heads round it and understand it. Also, as I said earlier today, it is a particularly good predictor of health outcomes for children.

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[Priti Patel]

With the amendment, hon. Members seek to preserve the Child Poverty Act 2010 in its original form, including the much discussed income measure and targets, and to extend the target year of the measures from the financial year beginning 1 April 2020 to that beginning 1 April 2030. The Government do not support that position.

First, on amendments 9 and 10, the existing measures and targets in the Child Poverty Act 2010 focus on the symptoms of child poverty while failing to tackle the root causes. We have had an extensive discussion this morning about many of the root causes. As I have described, the fundamental weaknesses with the existing statutory framework, set around the four income-related targets of child poverty, have become all too apparent.

[Neil Coyle]

Will the Minister give way?

[Priti Patel]

No, I will not give way.

Removing the flawed income-related measures and targets and replacing them with the new measures of worklessness and educational attainment will drive this Government and future Governments to improve disadvantaged children’s life chances, and it will strengthen our approach by tackling the root causes of child poverty. We do not believe that any number of duties, producing a UK strategy, or placing new demands on local authorities, would be a substitute for a clear commitment to report on the real root causes, which evidence tells us will make the biggest difference to improving the life chances of children and, importantly, transforming their lives. We will report on the life chances measures in this Bill and will be judged on our actions.

On amendment 97, I have described the fundamental weaknesses of the existing statutory measures and targets. It is a framework that incentivises Government action to move people from just below an arbitrary line to just over it, rather than tackling the fundamental issues that affect families, children and their life chances. Extending the target year to financial year 2030-31 will not overcome any of those fundamental weaknesses. Only by removing the flawed income-related targets and replacing them with new measures will we drive this and future Governments to improve and focus on children’s life chances. The Government are focused on doing that; we will focus our resources on achieving those outcomes. It is only right and fair to children and taxpayers that we do so. The Government will not throw good money after bad; it is not fair on our children or our taxpayers, and that is precisely what Opposition Members seek to do.

[Neil Coyle]

Will the Minister give way?

[Priti Patel]

No, I will not.

We have discussed the flaws and weaknesses of the measures to some extent. Members suggest that we should extend the deadline on the same flawed measures and force future Governments to spend money on tackling symptoms, not the root causes. I recognise that Members will probably press the amendments, but I urge them not to do so.