Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, where they have other resources, as they move into young adulthood, clearly they have to be resources of their households at that stage and their own capital and household income. The reality is that very many of this small group of youngsters are inheriting very substantial sums of money; that is why they are in the position that they are in. That is a decision in principle over whether we should support people who have very adequate resources of their own. We will continue to support those who have deteriorating conditions even when they have a high income. They just go back into the support group. Let me just go into the rather complicated position with European law and the specific judgment here, which I am looking at. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, will regard it as recent enough—this is the Lucy Stewart case on 21 July last year. It is within half a year, so I think that is recent. We have a code for soon and sooner or whatever; recent is within half a year. That judgment made it clear that we cannot use the past/present test to deny access to a benefit if a claimant demonstrates a genuine link to the UK in other ways, which may include consideration of the relationship of a claimant and the social security system of the competent member state or claimants’ family circumstances. The past/present test requires that a claimant must be present in Great Britain for 26 weeks out of the last 52 preceding a claim for employment and support allowance. We still lost the case, even though we had lots of powers on residence. Clearly, the view of this Government is that it should be a matter for the Government of this country to decide how people qualify for benefits. The effect of this judgment is that young people can qualify for a benefit even when they have not lived in this country for many years. I cannot be absolutely hard and fast on the European benefit-shopping issue; I can tell your Lordships only that this is causing us enormous concern at a number of levels and we are currently challenging Commission lawyers on it. The issue, at the simplest level, is that if you can call something social support it is much less likely to be abused and taken abroad than if it is a contributory right. That is where the battleground is and your Lordships can clearly see what we are doing here. When we are asked for a concession and whether we can get round the European law, what we are looking at is a system that basically provides the support for the vast bulk of the youngsters whom we want to support without opening our doors wide to current and future dangers of this kind of benefit exportability. That is the approach that we have adopted to try to get round this problem.