Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I am conscious that I have not spoken to our three amendments in the group, although the subject matter has effectively been covered. Our amendments simply provide for the amounts in Clauses 9, 10 and 12 to be subject to an annual uprating. The purpose of that is to give the Minister an opportunity to set out the Government's current position, particularly in the light of the issue raised by several noble Lords today of the IFS report: the fact that all the benefits that can flow from universal credit will be swamped by the negative effects of the tax and benefit changes, the most pernicious of which is the uprating by CPI. It will be interesting to hear from the Minister on that point. I was fascinated by this debate because it takes us back 18 months to when we were debating the Child Poverty Bill. I see the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, nod. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, tabled a very similar amendment then. To be fair, he was more ambitious—his amendment would have required minimum income standards to be introduced. I see that he is easier on the coalition Government. Contrary to what I would really like to do, I cannot say from the Front Bench today that we would call for minimum income standards to be immediately applied to the benefits system; I would not survive long if I did. I touch on Amendment 30B and issues about maternal health and health in pregnancy. I note that the health in pregnancy grant was stopped from 1 January this year and that the Sure Start maternity grant has been reduced to the first child only. I would be interested to hear from the Minister what compensates for the withdrawal of those benefits in addressing the problems that have been identified. When we debated this issue during the passage of the Child Poverty Bill, the answer from the ministerial brief was that there are real issues about calculation and work incentives. We pointed out at that stage that the Child Poverty Bill contained four measures to identify and try to tackle poverty: relative low income, absolute low income, combined low income and material deprivation, and persistent poverty. All of the focus has been on relative or absolute low income and those targets. At the time, the noble Lord, Lord Freud, asked me whether the Government considered 60 per cent of median income to be enough for families to live on. I am tempted to push the question back to him and ask his view on that. Our debate was not only about income transfers; there were the other building blocks out of poverty: education, health, housing and skills, including parenting skills, on which the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, in particular, pressed us. Having thought about it since, and having listened to the debate today, it seems to me that what the noble Lord is asking is not unreasonable. It is not for minimum income standards to be introduced but for there to be some calibration of them so that we can take stock of what is happening. In different ways, several noble Lords made the point that the universal credit has to be all things to all people, whether they are in work, out of work, do not want to work, are moving closer to the labour market, have health issues which prevent them working or are in urban or rural poverty—which have different components, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Wakefield identified. Somehow we have to fit all that into single benefit. We have acknowledged that the Government seek to support those who are more likely to be on benefits long-term because of health problems; that is reflected in the benefit rates proposed. However, that addresses just one component of the issue. It will be fundamentally difficult to address all the separate issues. There is also an issue, which has been touched on, about people being on benefit for a short time as opposed to a long time. I guess we could all at a pinch survive at benefit levels for a week, for as long as we do not have to buy new shoes, buy a new suit, go out to dinner—