Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I speak in support of this amendment, to which my name is attached. I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds for tabling it, and I pay tribute to both his and the Children's Society's long-standing work in support of children. My concern about this amendment is that the measure has some very poor consequences, whether intended or unintended. Perhaps the Minister can tell us which they are. I want to suggest three ways in which this cap, as the Government have put it together, is particularly badly constructed and three problems that it will cause. First, as we have heard, this measure will seriously and disproportionately affect children. A new DWP impact assessment came out today, which significantly changed the figures that we were working with previously. I have been able only to skim read it but I see from the headlines that the official impact assessment says that 220,000 children will be affected, and the losses in income those families will face are not small amounts. Initially, 67,000 households will lose an average of £83 a week, while 17 per cent of those affected will lose more than £150 a week. Those are very significant sums, so the behavioural impacts which the Minister wants to see happen will have to be very big indeed to address losses of that size, and I wonder what we can do about them. I am not clear what steps those parents are meant to take to be able to avert those losses. That impact assessment says that 44 per cent of households affected are already living in social housing—in other words, in the cheapest accommodation available in their area. These are not families who are living it up in Kensington mansions, sipping cocktails by the pool before dinner. Forty-four per cent of them are already in social housing and most of the rest are in the kind of private housing that the noble Baroness, Lady Hussein-Ece, described earlier. As anyone who has had cause to go knocking on doors in London will know, there is housing out there which is astonishingly expensive but of astonishingly poor quality. The nature of the private sector market in London and other very high-cost areas is such that it is depressingly easy to rack up rents of £350 a week if you have two or three children. What will happen and what are those families to do? In Committee, I put down an amendment which sought to exempt from the cap specific groups of vulnerable children who, for example, had been the subject of child protection orders, and I asked the Minister what those families could do to avoid being forced to move. He gave me three ways in which families could avoid that. The first was that they could negotiate a reduced rent with their landlord, although he had the good grace to acknowledge that may not succeed. The second way that the Minister suggested was that they could move into work, but when we look at the figures, we find that some 60 per cent of the families affected—a majority—are not required to work, either because they have small children or because they are sick or disabled and have limited capacity to work. In fact the Government's own policy of not trying to push sick people or the parents of young children out into work is now suggesting that they do that, which does not seem like a great idea either. The final suggestion which the Minister made was that families could use their savings to pay the shortfall. I believe that one of your Lordships mentioned in the previous debate that the average family in Britain had just £300-worth of savings. That would not go very far in paying shortfalls of this nature, and one has to suspect that these families are likely to have less than the average amount of savings. We therefore have to accept that what will happen is that these families will be forced to move. Many children's charities have made representations to me, as I am sure to many noble Lords, saying that they fear that families would be forced to move not just once but repeatedly. If they move to a cheaper area and rents rise faster than the cap, they have to move again. What are the consequences of that for the children? Again, I looked into this in Committee. The initial DWP impact assessment highlighted the possible damage to children forced to move school repeatedly, and the evidence is quite clear of the impact—the negative impact, obviously—which that has on children's academic achievement. As I also pointed out in Committee, forced moves reduce the ability of child protection professionals to keep track of families where children are at risk of abuse. I asked the Minister to write to me on how the Government would address those particular categories, and he did. I am afraid that it was with no very satisfactory encouragement and, again, I hope to give him the opportunity to be more specific when he responds to this. In research that looks into the case reviews that follow the serious events that happen to children who have faced abuse and sometimes death, certain themes come out again and again. One of them, and I have heard this said by Members of this House, is that when everyone gathers around the table for a serious case review, someone always says, ““Do you know, I wish we’d all talked before. Maybe, if we’d all talked to each other, this wouldn’t have happened””. One of the things that make it less likely that that communication will happen regularly is if the families in question move house repeatedly. Are we really going to force more families to do so? I am very concerned about what will happen in that regard, but I can see no way around it. What else can we do? We have to press on. The Minister’s next argument is that he is clear about what the policy is for. I am not at all clear about that. He said in Grand Committee that the purpose of the cap was to encourage work; the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has said many times in the media over the past 48 hours that he will ensure that people will never be better off on benefits than in work; and I have sat through all the stages of the Bill so far and lost count of the number of times that the Minister has told us that the universal credit will ensure that work always pays more than welfare. If that is the case, will he explain why this additional measure is needed? If work is always going to pay, we do not have a problem—so that cannot be the issue. My final concern is whether the comparison is fair, a point made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds. The Government—unintentionally, I am sure—are misrepresenting the impact of this amendment. They declare that no one should receive more in benefits than the average family will earn, yet surely they are wilfully ignoring the fact that that average family would themselves be entitled to claim child benefit for every child in the household. They are deliberately and intentionally putting child benefit on one side of the equation and leaving it out from the other, thereby constructing a test that cannot be fair. We have tried many times in Grand Committee to get the Minister to explain that anomaly. My noble friend Lady Lister put the point specifically to him on 23 November: how could he justify this? Clearly, she said, "““We are not comparing like with like””." The Minister said: "““My Lords, I acknowledge that we are not comparing like with like. We are looking at a sensible level at which to put the maximum benefit payment … I think that one can overelaborate the logic, which I will not attempt to do here””.—[Official Report, 23/11/11; col. GC 419.]" There is not much danger of the logic being overelaborated. Rather, we have a logical deficit here, and I invite the Minister to explain it. Thankfully, we have some mitigation here. The cavalry has appeared cantering over the horizon in the form of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, who has put down an amendment that allows us to address all these questions. In particular, he has pointed out that benefits specifically for children such as child benefit—a universal benefit, although recently some but not all families paying higher rates of tax have been excluded from it—are not means-tested. Originally it was a tax allowance, and it was always intended to be a transfer from the public in general to families with children, in recognition of the fact that children are a public benefit as well as a private one. Today’s kids will pay my pension—at least, if I am ever old enough to claim it, although the age at which I will be allowed to is receding into the distance. It therefore seems reasonable that we all make a contribution to that, hence the nature of universal child benefit. Once we start to decide that some benefits are not really for everyone and that some benefits such as this one are excluded, we have to understand the rationale for that. I struggle to do so. To be in a position where some families earning over £80,000 a year would get child benefit but the families that we are talking about would not is simply unjust. The Minister has said that this is a matter of principle. Frankly, that is the one thing it is not. He has decided on a cap but he has told us—and we already know—that certain types of payment will be exempt, such as disability living allowance, attendance allowance and some payments to war widows. All we are suggesting in the ame benefit to that list and saying that payments of child benefit specifically should be exempt as well. If we cannot do that for the children of our community, what can we do? I am pleased to support the amendment.