Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 50, to which my name is also attached. The amendment has already been spoken to by my noble friend Lady Thomas of Winchester, so I do not need to go into a great deal of detail to explain it. The basic purpose of the amendment, and what I want to do, is to highlight the plight of young carers. The amendment would provide enhanced protection to them, essentially, by replicating the current severe disability premium within the universal credit for severely disabled lone parents. This is an important area. Without this enhanced support for disabled adults with no adult carer to look after them, in practice too many young children become those carers and that can often result in a young child within a family looking after a mother, a father or another adult very much at the expense of their own educational and personal development. I was involved in this area of work a few years ago and I know that the reality is that carers as young as eight can get involved in what are essentially very adult caring responsibilities. That can include having responsibility for making meals, washing and cleaning but also for assisting very personal tasks such as personal washing, bathing and using the lavatory. These are not things that young children should be forced to do. DWP figures indicate that some 25,000 lone parents are currently in receipt of a severe disability premium, meaning that more than 40,000 children are likely to be affected. I am concerned that the cut in support will place substantial pressure on these children to take on additional inappropriate care responsibilities of the sort that I have explained, simply because the parent can no longer afford to pay for the additional costs of care for themselves. I recognise that one of the key benefits of the universal credit is to simplify the welfare system, something that I support, and it is true that disability premiums paid within the current welfare system can sometimes produce what feels like an overly complicated system, but I contend that simplification of the system must not override social justice for the most vulnerable and indeed the very idea of fairness. Although the disability premiums can be complicated, they provide vital support for tens of thousands of families in these difficult situations that I have described. This is a very different argument from those around work incentives, and I am sure that none of us in the Committee wants to see young children taking on these difficult and inappropriate adult caring responsibilities. It is for this reason that a way must be found to prevent that.