Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I am always staggered to find out more about my noble friend Lord Kirkwood. In Committee we learnt what he did in the bath, and now we have learnt that he goes around arresting bank accounts. We have been having some very interesting debates. However, I am slightly less sanguine about this issue than he is, perhaps largely because many of your Lordships have said that we have to look at people for what they can do and what their ambitions are. People, and groups of people, are not all the same. It strikes me that this is not about going in one direction or another, and that we are treating people as having exactly the same ability to manage their own money. I also heard in Committee the Minister’s ambitions for looking at other methods of dealing with payments. I looked back over the last four to five years of the growth in the Post Office card account and in basic bank accounts, which of course is where you would expect to find the sorts of people who make and deal with money in this manner. And there has been growth; in fact, 12 per cent of the whole population—according to the appropriate survey done by the DWP, which is published on their website—is using one of those two bank accounts. It also struck me that the price that we are paying for the Post Office card account is frighteningly expensive for what we get as a country. It is a bank of this country, and a bank, JP Morgan, underwrites it, and it charges the state for managing these Post Office card accounts. I believe that we pay something like £50 each a year—£142 million per annum—have those accounts run for us. It strikes me that we perhaps need a presumption to ensure that we put things of this nature in place by giving people the appropriate support, but at the same time ensuring assistance for those who cannot. The language that I have heard many Lordships use, which seems to come from the documents, is the ““chaotic family syndrome””, where people just cannot manage and need to have some different form of assistance. That is why I started by saying that we should not treat everyone in the same way. The Post Office card account is a bank account. It does not come with what we might normally expect a bank account to have, but why not, when we are paying so much money for it? Why are people not able to make payments from it for their utilities and gain benefits and savings? I guess that most noble Lords do this because of the way in which they pay for their heating, electricity and gas at the present time. Surely we should be offering that opportunity and using that ability to help people in that manner. We also should not think that people should not be able to separate out their money in the way in which they pay it to themselves. However, in order to do that you have to have appropriate levels of support. My question to the Minister is: if you are pursuing the idea of developing the facilities which a large number of people currently use for payment, will you also be able to offer advice and support to assist those people who might wish to avail themselves of an enhanced system that allows them to pay their utility bills monthly by a straight payment or direct debit, thus allowing them to get the benefits of reduced charges? I noticed that the Cabinet Office issued a press release for those who live in England, which says that £16.8 million of support will be given for free debt advice in this country. Does the Minister regard that as being some of the funding that he intends to use for the support that might go with these enhanced accounts? I know that over the years there has been considerable discussion about the use of the Post Office card account, primarily, of course, in the context of trying to support the local post office in each of our communities. Surely, however, if we were able to do more with it and to provide that advice, perhaps even at the Post Office, it might even be better to do that with the funding that might be available. There is the problem that many people, or some people, will not be able to manage and will need alternative forms of assistance and advice. My noble friend Lord Boswell was saying that we ought to move in one direction, but it strikes me that we must be wary and understand that there are people who will not be able to manage. We must be able to assist those people properly. One further point relates to the third amendment in this group, which I know the noble Lord has not yet spoken to. It is a point that comes up quite frequently on the matter of reviews. I feel very passionate about how we often approach these issues and how we structure them in Bills before this House, and about the fact that we look at them as features that have a milestone at some point in a whole system. One of the advantages that we have gained from the Harrington review—although it was not probably set up in that format—has been that it has been a much more iterative process between the community at large and politicians. This has meant that people have not been fixated on a particular date when things should happen. People have been able to hear, read about and commit to change continuously throughout the process of a new Bill. There needs to be what I would call continuous evaluation by an independent assessor right through the process of universal credit. All its aspects should be looked at and reported on. The days are gone when nothing is open for the public to see. We see reports that are written, which gives an opportunity to raise questions. Artificial milestones are perhaps not the way to go in understanding better how things are turning out for us. At some stages, your Lordships might wish to get faster answers and responses than simply waiting for one or two years, or whatever milestone is put in. I shall make this point subsequently in speaking to a variety of amendments about reviews. In conclusion, I should like simply to point out to the Minister that we spend a lot of money on the Post Office card account. Are we not able to make better use of that money and give people a much better deal in what we are providing for them?