Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I support the case that the noble Baroness has made. I am particularly interested in the answer to the question about an independent appeal right in these circumstances. That would be very useful indeed and I hope that the Minister can confirm that that will be true. I have four amendments in this group. They can be dealt with with reasonable dispatch but they deal with a very important issue that surrounds the whole question of amounts recoverable by deductions from earnings. During the Bill’s Commons stages the Government amended Clause 102 to add a new Section 71ZD(3)(e), which addresses the, "““level of earnings below which earnings must not be reduced””." That is very welcome, as far as it goes, but I wonder whether the Minister could say a bit about whether any thought has been given to how that will be delivered and how that protection will be rolled out. That is important. In the process, of course, these amendments seek to encourage the Minister to take the thing a little further because irreducible, attachment-free limits are available only on earnings and, as we heard earlier in the Committee, earnings are not the same as income. If it is constrained and the protection is available only to earnings then we would be asking what happens to people who are unemployed and who, by definition, do not have earnings. There are some other concerns about the protection available to free disposable income from other sources of debt arrestment, such as rent arrears, council tax arrears and all that kind of thing. These amendments are trying to extend the available protection to the unemployed and their income. I would like to adduce the fact, which the department is no doubt already aware of, that there are models for doing this in other parts of the United Kingdom and the European Union. Our sister European countries have well developed systems for protecting income—and I mean income, not just earnings. Of course, it is much easier for them to do that because many of them start off with a minimum income system. There are three or four examples which I could quote if I had more time. That is a standard set-up on a basis that allows them to look at deductions based on limits in relation to national income levels that are well established and well set in other parts of their systems. We do not have that. However, I want to take a moment to explain to the Committee that in Scotland there is a protected minimum balance available on arrestment of wages. It protects a set amount and the lower monthly threshold, when I last checked it in 2010, was in the region of £415 per month. With a level like that being protected when there are pending or arrested wages in Scotland, it gives a fair amount of protection to children in a family to defend against the detriment to mental and physical health. It also enables protection against some of the things that happen when families end up with not enough money to feed themselves. The point that colleagues need to remember is that this is an administrative process. In courts there is always the backstop of the judge. At whatever level in the courts, there is someone who can ask, ““What are the means?””, and make a sensible judgment on the facts as shown in the case. Since it is an administrative process, we need to be as sensitive as we can to protecting people’s ability to feed their families. We all know what happens otherwise; people are driven into the grey economy, criminality, drug abuse and worse, which is not a sensible thing to happen. The amendment introduced in the Commons is welcome progress as far as it goes but I encourage my noble friend to think about, first, how he is going to roll this out and, secondly, whether he can be tempted to extend the protection a bit further so that basic family needs can be protected in the future. In addition to supporting the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, this is something that the Minister should seriously consider in the future gestation of the provisions of the Bill.