Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I strongly support the amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and my noble friend Lady Sherlock. I should declare an interest, in a way, and the noble Lord referred to this: much of the work being done on minimum income standards has been done by the Centre for Research in Social Policy, my colleagues at Loughborough University. I pay tribute to them for all the work that they have done. I have made this point before in the House, and I fear that I will probably make it again many times: we debate social security and it has been reformed endlessly—more times than some of us would prefer to remember—yet we never talk about the adequacy of these benefits that we are reforming or debating. That is central to what we should be talking about. Minimum income standards provide a tool to assess that adequacy. As the noble Lord said, no one is arguing that we should pay benefits tomorrow at the levels set by minimum income standards; other factors come into account when deciding what benefit levels should be. As Donald Hirsch has argued, though, it is a standard to which society might aspire. As the noble Lord has said, the standard is not simply dreamt up in another era by academics such as myself; it is based on what members of the public believe is a minimum socially acceptable standard of living. In drawing up the standards, we are talking about not wants but needs. Members of the public are clear that needs are not just about basic food, clothes and shelter—keeping body and soul together, as my noble friend said—but about the ability to participate in society. This is a crucial human need. The benefits for people of working age fall far short of the minimum income standard. The latest upratings carried out by the Centre for Research in Social Policy for 2011 showed that the gap between benefit levels and minimum income standards has widened over the past three years. According to the centre for research, the rate for a single adult on income support or jobseeker’s allowance is only 41 per cent—or two-fifths—of the minimum income standard. That is particularly important when we come to the second amendment, Amendment 30B, in relation to pregnant women. Mention has already been made of the Marmot report. Again, I have to declare an interest, as I was a member of one of the working groups that fed into the Marmot review. The report said: "““Support to families needs to start prenatally to improve the health and well-being of mothers. There are strong associations between the health of mothers and the health of babies and equally strong associations between the health of mothers and their socioeconomic circumstances. This means that early intervention before birth is as critical as giving ongoing support during their child’s early years””." The report goes on to say: "““Central to this is ensuring that women have an adequate level of income and other material support during pregnancy to enable them to maintain a good level of health and nutrition. This requirement needs to be taken into account when considering minimum income levels for healthy living””." The previous Government started to address this question—not sufficiently in my view, but they did start to address it. However, unfortunately the present Government have reversed the policies put forward by the previous Government. According to Sam Royston of Family Action, an unemployed woman aged 18 to 25 receiving £51.85 a week and an unemployed woman aged 26 to 60 receiving £64.45 a week in jobseeker’s allowance and ESA will lose £1,735 during pregnancy and in the first year of a child’s life as a result of this loss of benefits. Other research carried out by Jonathan Bradshaw and Emese Mayhew in connection with the Millennium Cohort Study underlines the association between poverty and low birth weight, which in turn is associated with a higher risk of mortality and poor health. In their study, they warn that, "““there is a particular reason to be concerned about first time mothers who become pregnant while in receipt of the single person’s rate of Income Support””." My noble friend Lady Sherlock quoted a recent letter from the Reverend Paul Nicolson in the Guardian. As she said, that letter ends: "““Therefore comfortable citizens with adequate incomes have no standards against which to judge the justice of the level of their taxation that supplements the incomes of the poorest both in and out of employment””." We are those comfortable citizens with adequate incomes, and it behoves us to ensure that those standards are written into the legislation that we are passing.