Welfare Reform Bill

I always hate to disappoint Tories, Mr Speaker. The Minister mentioned some concessions, but it remains an unfair imposition on parents with caring responsibilities to make them pay a fee to obtain, in her words, a calculation of what they may be entitled to. The Government are always keen to say that people should do the right thing, but what happens when they try to do the right thing and adopt a collaborative approach? Frankly, all the evidence shows that a collaborative approach is often the last thing that people can get when a marriage breaks down—all sorts of issues to do with personalities, emotions and children being part of the bartering process between two parents make that almost impossible. The Minister was a bit dismissive of some of her colleagues in the House of Lords. I want to come back to them in a moment. If the Minister gets the opportunity to wind up, will she tell the House where the Government got the figure of £25,000 from? That, apparently, is the cost to the taxpayer of each case. I cannot find the source for that figure. If we divide 1,142,600 cases into £450 million, which is how much it costs to run the CSA, we get an annual cost of £393.90. So where on earth does the £25,000 figure come from? I would be interested to know. Members of the House of Lords did not just object to the amount of money to be paid; they objected on the basis of the principle that if a parent with caring responsibilities was entitled to maintenance for the children or child whom they looked after, they should get that support. An array of Conservative Members of the House of Lords have asked the Government to change their mind: Lord Carrington, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, Lord Howe of Aberavon, Lord Jenkin, Lord Lawson of Blaby, Lord MacGregor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, Lord Mawhinney, Lord Mayhew, Lord Newton and Lord Wakeham. I remember the '80s, and I do not think that any of these people were fully paid up members of the liberal tendency. Yet they have all asked the Government to change their mind on the point of principle. I hope, then, that we get something more than what we heard from the Minister tonight. This is a ridiculous provision that, frankly, should not have been in the Bill in the first place. Now we come to disabled children. This is the cut that even the Prime Minister did not want to admit to. My hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark) again asked about it today, and again the Prime Minister refused to recognise the reality. I particularly congratulate the Lords on dealing with this issue and not running away from it, because it would have been easy for them to put this matter to one side after they were defeated by two votes on 12 December. But they did not. They returned to it last night and voted to challenge the Government on the cuts to the disabled children allowance. The Minister has been clever with her statistics but according to Every Disabled Child Matters, the loss under the new system could amount to as much as £22,000 during the childhood of a disabled child and will cost the parents of a disabled child nearly £1,400 a year, and approximately 170,000 families will have this benefit frozen from 2013. I admit that there are transitional arrangements, but I have never come across a piece of legislation with so much sticking tape—there are reviews here and transitional arrangements there. This is not a strategy; it is a dog's mess. Every Disabled Child Matters estimates that approximately 63% of all future disabled children will lose out as a result of this policy. The Minister is an honourable woman and has tried to be gentle with the House today by using fine words about how this will not mean one thing to children and will mean another thing, but the reality is that in order to pay the most severely disabled children an extra £1.75 a week, children who are not as disabled—I use those words advisedly—will lose their benefit. We are talking about children who, for the most part, do not have night-time care needs. Typically, they include children with Down's syndrome or cerebral palsy, and children who are profoundly deaf. In future, disabled children will not receive any benefit from the transitional arrangements; indeed, any disabled child born after 2013 will access significantly less support. I appeal to Members, particularly Liberal Democrat Members. I hope that they will look at what their colleagues supported in the Lords. In fact, I even appeal—although not very much—to some Conservative Members to look at what their colleagues in the Lords did. This is an amendment to be supported. It is about decency, about disabled children and about the support that families who are at the hard end of looking after disabled children deserve to receive. I hope that this House supports the amendment. I said that I would not speak as long as the Minister, but I want briefly to draw the House's attention to Lords amendment 77. At the end of the last day on Report, the Government secured an amendment to the Bill that, on closer examination, significantly weakened obligations that had been placed on them by the previous Government's Child Poverty Act 2010. That amendment replaces references to ““progress”” in the 2010 Act with much weaker language about ““measures””. Child Poverty Action Group, among others, points out that that is, in effect, removing the duty to achieve any progress towards meeting the targets before 2020. I hope that we do not lose sight of that. I have tried—in a shorter time than the Minister—to set out some of the issues that have been raised in recent weeks. Labour Members feel very strongly about those issues because they impact on the poorest, those who are most disadvantaged and those who have been demonised because they live in socially rented housing, and because they do not take into account that children at the age of 14 or 15 might require a bit of extra room and do not all need to be decanted into a tiny box of a flat. I appeal to the Government to consider seriously what is being proposed today, and to support the Lords amendments rather than disagreeing with them.