Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I trust that I have an equally wise amendment. For benefit recipients, their families, their advisers and the statutory services that support and assist such people—largely vulnerable people—the next 24 months will present challenges, difficulties and new hurdles. Rarely has there been such a mammoth change to the tax and benefit system, not to mention it happening with the parallel loss of professional advice to the people concerned if this Bill remains unamended. Of course, for the rich, as ever, there is no problem. I happened to read an advertisement in the current edition of Counsel, which for those of you who do not read it is the journal for barristers, which stated: "““Potentially up to £100,000 tax relief up for grabs: limited window … to get back some of the 50% tax … act before 5 April … New rules which received Royal Assent in July 2011 … created an opportunity to claim tax relief on pension contributions … made in the last few years … the twist is … these rules can be … retrospective … there are some hoops to jump through and therefore it is important that individuals … seek advice””." Cheekily, the firm gives an e-mail address that starts, ““barcouncil””, although it cannot have offended the Bar Council too much as it ran the advert. Clearly, if you are well paid and can afford professional advice, that could be worth £100,000 to you. My interest is not with such folk but with those seeking to challenge inaccurate assessments by HMRC's tax credit office or those for whom benefits may be their sole income—the difference between poverty and coping and the dividing line between surviving and drowning. Benefits are changing, not simply with the loss of the discretionary Social Fund, about which the Minister and I have spoken, not simply with methods of payment changing from weekly to fortnightly or monthly, not simply in who the payments are made to; not simply in rules affecting those in work as well as those out of work, but in fundamental ways affecting the right to one's home, the arrival of the benefit cap and the definition of being ““in work””—a definition that, as the noble Lord, Lord Freud, admitted last month, is still awaited despite its importance to the new system of benefits under the welfare Bill. Some changes—to the number of hours rather than to the level of pay—will kick in from next month. For example, to qualify for working tax credit, couples with children will have to work 24 hours a week between them, not 16 as before; and one of them will have to work at least 16 hours a week. While the Government see this as reducing the disparity between couples and lone parents, who are required to work at least 16 hours a week, more than 800,000 people will be affected, and probably most of them will be unable to find more hours of work. With school holidays, piecework, overtime or fluctuating hours, new understanding of such rules will be imperative. Also from next month, thousands of people in the work-related activity group for employment and support allowance will automatically lose their existing non-means tested benefits, having drawn them for 12 months—even those who are deemed unfit to work or who at present are not expected to work. Therefore, from April—and even more from next year with the introduction of universal credit—we will see a swathe of claimants struggling to understand the new system of benefits and faced with DWP staff who, with the best will in the world, will be equally unfamiliar with the new rules and regulations, and will also have to handle a new IT system. In Committee on the welfare Bill, noble Lords across the House repeatedly stressed the importance of adequate training for DWP staff, particularly in the areas of mental health and fluctuating health conditions, and on top of demands for umpteen new protocols such as those on conditionality, which for the first time will affect those in work and not just the unemployed. Furthermore, there are large areas of discretion within the welfare Bill, for example on what counts as acceptable childcare or travel to work time, on whether the number of hours work can be increased, or on whether it is best to leave a tried and tested employer for a new one who will apparently pay more but who offers less security. Decision-makers will have to make a wide range of difficult judgments. If they are wrong, the impact on them will be slight, but the impact on the claimant may be colossal. There will also be discretionary awards aplenty, particularly in housing. Some will be taken for the first time by local authorities, with no national guidelines and no experience to assist them, and with different rules on eligibility in different areas. Without good advice, how will the claimant know whether they qualify? This will be particularly the case in the first few years, as the new welfare system beds down. Will we expect claimants, many of whom have the lowest literacy levels, to pore through the regulations to see whether they apply to them? The denial of something to which they are entitled will not affect just the claimant. If as a result they are made homeless, they self-harm, their children go into care or they rack up debts and rent arrears, the chances are that it will be the NHS, social services or prisons that will pick up the tab. There are significant new rules to be implemented, particularly on underoccupancy, where discretionary funds will be available to help the occasional carer to stay overnight, or perhaps provide an extra bedroom for a disabled child or for a family member with disturbed sleep patterns, or where the home must be significantly adapted for disabled access. However, to ask a vulnerable person to navigate their way through such applications, which have a profound effect, is to ask the impossible. The same will be true with the benefit cap, and particularly with housing advice. Although there will be exemptions where the client's home is at immediate risk, how is the client to know this in advance of getting advice? Although we failed on the welfare Bill in a number of our attempts, for example to enable people to keep overpayments of benefit where they were the result of official error that they could not have known about, some decisions about that have been left to discretion. Without advice to the client as well as training for DWP staff, we are not going to achieve right-first-time decisions, and without those, the cost is not simply to the client but to the system with the appeals and everything that goes with them. The Minister may say that this is not legal advice. I trust he does not because that would be very wrong. Especially with new regulations, a legal eye is needed to understand the significance of ““may”” as opposed to ““should””, and that ““include”” does not preclude other factors. As with the top end of barristers whom I quoted earlier, the significance of dates and timing needs pretty sophisticated understanding of the nuances. If the Bill is unamended, 135,000 welfare claimants are going to lose their access to advice. The amendment does not deal with that. My amendment is about helping the Government to adjust their policy in the light of outcomes following Royal Assent. It is to provide the chance for joined-up government across Whitehall, or rather from Tothill Street to Victoria Street, by having an independent assessment, of the sort well used by the noble Lord, Lord Freud, in the Harrington review, looking at how claimants are able to obtain the benefits due to them, feed in the relevant decisions and get the right legal advice about benefits as well as at how providers, such as local authorities, or advisers, such as MPs, are feeling the effects of queries, complaints or difficulties with the new welfare system. This will be valuable intelligence. It will help the Government as well as other agencies. I hope the Minister can accept this. It is a way of looking at the interplay of these two changes to our system: the enormous Welfare Reform Bill and all its changes with, potentially, the lack of advice for exactly those who need to manoeuvre their way through that system. I beg to move.