Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I feel a huge weight of responsibility here. The Minister does not want me to test the opinion of the House, and I understand that, but hundreds of thousands of families all over the country with disabled and severely disabled children are desperate about this issue; I repeat, they are desperate. The pressure of that is difficult to bear. But I do want to say that I respect very strongly the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Freud, for the huge amount of work that I know he does all the time on working towards a simpler welfare system. He has done a fantastic job on this. But, as he knows, the job of this House is to try to ameliorate the worst effects of legislation, and that is what we have done consistently throughout this process. The Minister has generously agreed to take back and think about these issues following the moving speeches that have been made by many noble Lords, but the fact is that we in this House do not have an assurance that anything will happen. The Minister is under huge pressure from a Secretary of State who is an awfully long way from this. I think that he has little real understanding of what it is to be a poor family with a very disabled child and not able to afford to give to that child what they know it needs. I have concerns about that because we need the Government to understand the enormity of the pressure on these families. I have often said to my own children that I do not think I could have managed it at all because these things are so tough. That is the situation here. The Minister referred to a cliff edge at the age of 16. The noble Lord in his place beside me referred to a cliff edge at the age of three. The worry is that what the Government are doing is introducing a cliff edge at birth and then at one, two and three, when severe disability hits. Do we want these families to fall off a cliff—and that must be how it feels—when they realise that they have made a lifelong commitment to care for a child but the state withdraws some of its support? That is a big issue for us. The Minister referred to DLA funding swimming lessons, school holiday clubs and so on. The reality is that DLA does not cover adequately those expenditures, and that is the issue. Families do not have enough money, and it is why 40 per cent of them are in poverty. They need more money if they are to help their children fulfil their potential, whatever that potential may be. The Minister also referred to families being better off in work. I accept that, but the difficulty is that that is being achieved by impoverishing an awful lot of people, some of whom can work—speaking for myself, I support the Government’s quest to get more and more people back into work. But when we consider families with disabled children, particularly single parents with disabled children, as others have said, they cannot do this and it is terrible to impoverish them. That is the dilemma we are facing. I know that the Minister is going to be deeply unhappy with me and I do not like making him deeply unhappy, but I owe it to the families out there to test the opinion of this House. We have to do it. Division on Amendment 1 Contents 246; Not-Contents 230. Amendment 1 agreed.