Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I support both amendments. I shall concentrate on the issue of the isolation of parents in poverty and the effects that that has on possibly driving some isolated impoverished parents towards comfort in alcohol, cigarettes or other means of escape. I am thinking particularly of visits that I have made in the past to Barnardo’s families in temporary accommodation provision and of when I have spoken to parents at children’s centres. Research into families living in temporary accommodation identifies that, when parents become isolated, they are at great risk of moving into depression and then losing the capacity to care for their children. One of the benefits of things like the family temporary accommodation scheme, which brings families in those situations together and gives them support, or children’s centres is that they allow people who might otherwise feel very isolated to join together, have care for their children, have coffee with each other, get support and feel that they are part of a community. I was interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, refer to mobile phones. That might seem a luxury but, if one is isolated and one has a family a long way from one’s own community, it is a vital tool for keeping connected. One needs money for transport; one needs to get those two buses to get to the local community and to one’s extended family. My concern is that if we do not get this right, we put more pressure on those families and it is less easy for them to reach out to others and feel connected. The danger is that they may move towards a depressive state, and when mothers are in that state they are more likely to turn to, for example, alcohol for comfort. I have heard mothers say about smoking, ““Well, it’s my only comfort. This is how I get by, although I know it’s bad for me””. They may have less money to pay for cigarettes—there is another side to that. When they drink and smoke when they are pregnant, this has a bad impact on the foetus. Foetal alcohol syndrome is more and more recognised as a very adverse outcome for children in terms of their future mental health and development, and we know how appalling the impact is of smoking when pregnant. In particular, it lowers the birth weight of children, which limits their development later in life. All the other measures in the Bill, such as the underoccupation penalty and the cap on housing benefit payments, may put pressure on these vulnerable groups. It is right, as the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, have said, that we research the impact of this on low-income families, and that we particularly consider women who are coming up to pregnancy or who are pregnant.