Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I will come to that. What we are dealing with here is rather interesting, as we move from one system to the universal credit. We are dealing with the current system as it exists on paper, we are dealing with where we want to go in the universal credit, and then we are dealing with something in the middle, which is how things actually work on the ground. This is one of the areas in which things are working on the ground as they are not really meant to. It is simply not the role of the severe disability premium to provide money for young carers. Clearly young carers could be affected if they are providing support for a disabled parent who receives the severe disability premium. Under the current system, the youngster gets it because there is no adult in the house looking after them and they are not allowed to receive the carer’s premium. It is one of those things that has unintentionally fallen through the cracks. It was simply not intended as a support for young carers; it was designed to support severely disabled people who live alone. As I said in Committee, the needs of young carers cannot be dealt with effectively through the social security system. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, gave us a very moving example. One could not help but be touched by that story. The Government’s carers’ strategy, published last year, made it clear that support for young carers should focus on achieving their educational and employment potential, and that they should have the same opportunities as other young people, without assuming that they should always be a carer. In achieving this aim, the primary responsibility for supporting young carers must lie with local authorities and social services, not with the social security system. That is the right place for it to be. The other point that I need to make, going back to the main thrust, is that it is right to target additional support for severely disabled people in universal credit on cases where the work capability assessment has established that there is limited capability for work and work-related activity—that is, on severely disabled people who have the least opportunity to work. Noble Lords are concerned that some disabled people who currently get additional premiums will in future get the lower addition in universal credit, equivalent to the work-related activity component in ESA. That is why we are providing transitional protection for those claimants with existing premiums whose overall universal credit entitlement would be less than under the old system as a direct result of moving to universal credit, provided their circumstances stay the same. In response to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, on defining transitional protection, we are still working on pinning that down with precision. We are also looking at the interaction between ESA migration and the move to universal credit. The structure that we have is a means-tested universal credit. We have deliberately kept the extra costs of disability outside, within the DLA and to be within PIP. That is the structure and it is not means-tested for the deliberate reason that the extra costs of disability are there regardless of whether you are in work. Regardless of your level of income, you have extra costs as a result of your disability, so it is structured in that particular way. In conclusion, the amendment would return us to the complexity of the existing system and would entail an additional cost of around £400 million, unless there were other changes to the amendment. I can assure noble Lords, from the bottom of my heart and with scars on my back, that the £400 million is simply unaffordable right now. Therefore, I urge the noble Baroness to withdraw the amendment.