Welfare Reform Bill

I support my noble friend’s amendment. Following on from what the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, said, I would say that the test of fraud is normally—I think I saw a former Lord Chancellor who would know much better than I—associated with intent and ignorance of the law and is not a defence, but I think in this case it is because we are dealing with the interlocking of very vulnerable people and a new and very different system for people to understand. There are three or four matters on which if I were asked now whether people needed to declare things, I could not guide them, and I like to think I have some nodding acquaintance with this Bill. For example, a lone parent has a boyfriend who works away. He stays with her overnight one or twice over the weekend. As a result, is she no longer a lone parent? Clearly it will not depend on their sleeping arrangements but on what contribution he makes to their financial arrangements. On a weekend basis, would that be sufficiently substantial to make her no longer a lone parent but part of a couple and therefore falsely declaring if she claims to be a lone parent? I am not clear what would happen in that situation under the Bill. Perfectly reasonably she might regard the fact that as she is getting universal credit she is not a lone parent and he is somebody who comes in as a boyfriend but not a partner. With housing benefit, you could have a family with a student son who is living at home, going to the local university and working part-time. Should he be declared for housing benefit as a potential contributor to the rent so that non-dependent adult deductions come into play? I do not know. I think it would be quite difficult for that couple to assess. Let me give another example that we discussed at considerable length and about which the Minister was rightly sympathetic—kinship carers. Conventionally, kinship carers are entitled to claim for child credit and so on if they have the equivalent of the child benefit book, which normally takes about eight weeks to come across. In future, given that child benefit will not necessarily be a separate benefit entitlement, if there is a rotating relationship in which the child goes back to its birth parents for a few weeks and then, because the father or the mother may be an addict of some degree, goes back to the grandparents, at what point and for how long a period of continuous care are the kinship carers entitled to claim the child elements in universal credit? I do not know. In those three cases—and I could elaborate another six on disability benefits that are becoming clear to us—I would not be able to advise somebody on what they should declare on their forms as being relevant for the consideration of UC. It would be natural for them in those quite complicated situations not to declare things that appear to work against them. They would not be doing it with an intent to deceive. They may think it is a perfectly proper statement of their position as they see it, yet under this clause they could be caught for negligence and fined. That is completely unreasonable. The one piece of advice I would give the Minister is that whatever he does, whether he claims that this is needed as a reserve power or not, he should not touch it for at least three years until after the Bill has come into practical effect because of the bedding-down issues that it will have. The Minister has to make only one mistake, such as his department suing somebody for penalties for negligence when the department was wrong—and there will inevitably be departmental error; there always is when you introduce new systems—and the whole of the good will behind this Bill will disappear overnight.