Welfare Reform Bill

I thank the Minister for his responses, although I may not like their content. I also thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Howe, Lady Lister and Lady Sherlock, for their support on these issues, which are very real. My guess is that there will come a time when the Government will have to revisit this when they see the results. The words of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, ought to be resonating around. She spoke about vulnerable women and inequalities within households. She said: "““These are women fighting for their children””." We are talking about people without great access to income needing to feed their children. Very often, it will be a mother living with a man who is not the father of those children. This is great—I am a stepmum and well used to these relationships, but we have to understand that we are very often talking about not the idealised couple but the couple struggling to get their relationship together. Not to enable the woman as a right to have access to that, I find a little strange. What troubles me even more than that, because I am quite sure the Government will find they will need to do this in due course, is that—if I understood the Minister correctly—once there is experience of abuse of money or children at risk, the payments will at that point be split. I do not like waiting for accidents to happen. It seems to me much better than waiting for that debt to build up or that financial abuse to put the better architecture in place first. This does not seem to me a healthy way of doing it. The third thing I would like to mention is budgeting. I was involved with the very beginning of the FSA financial capability forum, I think it was called. At that time, and in much of what the Minister has said, we were talking about budgeting; that is, what you spend your money on. The whole thrust of what we did was about budgeting. These amendments are not about budgeting; they are about income. They really are different. They are about power and confidence, and enabling the people who look after children to have access to the money that is aimed for children and those with responsibility for rent to have access to that. It is not about budgeting: they know jolly well what to do with the money. There are two lots of people who know immensely well how to manage their money. One is the very rich. The other is the very poor, because it really matters. We are not talking about budgeting in this amendment. It is about income, which is different from spending. My noble friend Lady Healy was saying to me earlier that mothers need to feed their children every day. That is when they need the money. I was a bit upset that her son seemed to need feeding every day rather than once a week or once a month as the payments are going to be, but that is the reality. The person who has to put food on the table every day needs the confidence of knowing that the money is there. They know jolly well how to budget and how to feed the kids. What they need is access to that money and it should be under their control. This should be a family choice. I hope that the Minister will think about this. Clearly, the computing systems will be set up, because once things have gone wrong there will be powers to enable the payment to be split in this or a similar way. I am grateful that at the least the powers and the IT systems will be there. It just seems an awful shame to wait until things have gone wrong before making this choice available. With those comments, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 102ZA withdrawn. Amendment 102A not moved. Clause 97 agreed. Amendment 102B not moved. Clause 98 : Payments on account Amendment 102C Clause 98 : Payments on account Amendment 102C Moved by