Welfare Reform Bill

My Lords, I admit that this is not the amendment that I had wanted to move but I have been prevented from moving that one by the—and I hope that this is not unparliamentary language—sneaky amendment that the Government passed on the evening of 11 January, which ran contrary to the earlier decision made by your Lordships’ House to protect the ESA youth provision. This amendment simply calls for a report on the impact of its abolition so that the young people affected are not left completely in the lurch. Noble Lords will recall that we are concerned here with the abolition of a provision which has been an accepted and uncontested part of social security legislation since 1975. It enables young people who have been disabled from birth or childhood to access contributory employment and support allowance without having paid the necessary contributions on the grounds that they cannot be expected to have paid them. I shall not go over all the arguments that have already been made but I want to pick up one point that the Minister made—that young people who do not qualify for income-related ESA have independent means. I find it strange that the Government, who have such concern about so-called welfare dependency on the state, do not seem to understand that in the 21st century an adult who has to depend totally economically on another finds that demeaning. It is not right. The abolition of the youth ESA provision was originally justified on the grounds of administrative simplification, as the noble Lord has said. That argument did not stand up well to scrutiny, so the Government shifted their ground and argued that its abolition was necessary to protect against the effects of a European Court of Justice decision in the case of Stewart, as the Minister has explained. This decision is dated 21 July 2011. The Grand Committee discussed the youth condition on 8 November—three and a half months later—yet the Minister did not mention it. If the implications of the decision were so significant, surely someone in the DWP would have noticed them during those three and a half months. The first that noble Lords heard of it was in January. Interestingly, in January the department was also rebuked by the UK Statistics Authority for rushing out figures on benefit tourism with insufficient regard to weaknesses in the data. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research argued that these same figures disproved ministerial claims about benefit tourism. I raise this only because I wonder whether the ESA youth condition has not become the victim of a moral panic in the DWP about the much exaggerated problem. That is not to say that I am defending benefit tourism, where it happens. More importantly, I have received advice from Dr Charlotte O’Brien, a law lecturer at the University of York. She is an expert in this area and I am very grateful to her. She disputes the department’s interpretation of the implications of the Stewart case. In her view, the Government’s ““claim that ‘we could end up paying this benefit, on a long-term unconditional basis, to more people who have never lived in the United Kingdom but who can simply demonstrate a link to it’; and the suggestion that the ruling makes ESA in youth much more widely available are not supported by either the rules on social security co-ordination or by the wording of the judgment””. I shall not wear the patience of your Lordships’ House by going into detail. I just wish to say that it is unlikely that in many such cases the UK will be the ““competent state””—a necessary condition of entitlement. However, where it is, it is still open to the UK Government to apply a ““real link test””, which would not be deemed to be arbitrary in the way that the residence test was in Stewart. When I put it to Dr O’Brien that it would appear that the Stewart judgment had been seized on as a pretext, she agreed, adding, ““I think it is a very flimsy pretext””. If, however, the department’s interpretation were correct, it might also raise questions about entitlement to DLA/PIP and attendance allowance. Can the Minister please give the House a firm assurance that there will be no attempt in future to abolish those payments using the same pretext? Finally, I come to the question of money. The impact assessment for this measure did not include financial savings in its list of policy objectives, yet Ministers have subsequently used these savings as an argument to justify it. What savings are we talking about? The amendment overturned by the House of Commons would have cost a mere £17 million by 2015-16. That is a cumulative cost. It would be really helpful if the Minister could stick to annual costings, or are they so minimal as to be unquantifiable on an annual basis? Surely it is an abuse of financial privilege to slap it on an amendment, the cost of which falls easily within the normal margin of error. I do not blame the Minister, but in both Houses Ministers have tried to justify the abolition of youth ESA as part of what they have called the Government’s ““principled approach to reform””. I believe that this mean-minded little measure and the justifications put forward for it, together with the application of financial privilege and the manner in which the Government moved their own amendment on Report, are totally unprincipled. I beg to move.