Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I, too, should like to speak positively for these two amendments, Amendments 30A and 30B, from the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock. I commend the work that Paul Nicholson and the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust have done. There is some very important information there for all of us. Last night, I spoke briefly on the Localism Bill about sustainable development, which is another term that all of us would want to speak in favour of but that not everyone wants to pin down. I referred to the south-eastern part of the diocese which I represent. In places such as Kinsley and Fitzwilliam, there is profound poverty, related almost directly to the collapse of the mining industry during the past 20 years, and significant worklessness. I take up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, about work disincentives. This is an area of our diocese where we need to look in that direction and need to be careful about how we order welfare reform. Featherstone, well known to those of your Lordships who used to be fans of Rugby League and Eddie Waring, is a sad place now, being one of the most depressed and deprived parts of our part of Yorkshire. I think that I am right in saying that it has one of the lowest percentages of motor car ownership of anywhere in England, which is an indicator of the problems faced by areas such as that. It therefore seems essential for us to focus on the question of minimum income. Our own General Synod, some 10 years ago now in July 2001 in a debate on the health of the poor, passed a motion which asked Her Majesty’s Government to commission independent research which would lead to the identification of minimum income standards related to need and then bring forward the legislation that would put such minimum standards into effect. That was 10 years, and one Government, ago. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, will be pleased to hear that the same sort of thing has been passed by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Indeed, other bodies, not just church bodies, have made similar points. It is not simply the sort of urban poverty that I have just been referring to in our part of the world, but rural poverty too. Immediately before my time in Yorkshire I spent eight years in Norfolk, and one of the things that I encountered, more than I ever imagined I would, was rural poverty. It is depressing that that is growing faster even than urban poverty due to the increased cost of fuel, increasingly limited public transport and the need to maintain a car. Poverty is now hitting not only the unemployed but those on low wages. It is those very people who are often budgeting carefully to cover their costs and, through no fault of their own, find themselves in difficulties. A single unemployed person in a rural area now has only one-third of his or her cost of living covered by benefits, and that is just to get to a level of subsistence living. Indeed, an article in the Guardian today notes that the Family Budget Unit published groundbreaking research in 1999, 12 years ago now, that showed that the unemployment benefits of a couple with two children were £39 a week below a robust income needed for healthy living. That research was used in the London living wage by the GLA. No Governments—I am taking us back now to 1999 and 2001—have published or adopted robust estimates of the weekly cost of healthy living like those now provided by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which have been based on the science of nutrition, the minimum weekly needs for fuel, clothing and transport and the opinions of the public as to reasonableness. We have already heard reference made to concern for pregnant women, which feeds straight into the area of nutrition and lifestyle. We also have concerns that the minimum level is set at a liveable rate so that, especially, people like mothers and pregnant women are able to get enough food adequately to feed their families. This seems to be another area, rather like the issue of sustainable development, where all of us would basically be in favour of these things but we would be very careful about ever stating what we meant by it. I understand why that might be on some occasions, because it could always mean that those who wished to proceed with litigation would try to find fault in an Act, but ultimately it will not do to talk about minimum income and sustainable development if we are not prepared to make it clear what we mean by that and use the information that we have—the background statistics—to take forward the social responses that we need. On those grounds, I support the amendments that we are focusing upon.