My Lords, I shall make a brief intervention in these two important debates. I congratulate my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, on securing the time. I should perhaps say at the outset—and the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, rightly adverted to the fact—that I had a failure of nerve earlier last week and withdrew my prayer to annul. I did so because I think the Treasury are requiring the department to take the introduction of this fundamental flagship policy right to the edge of proper implementation. The Minister told the House last week that the department has already been required to make significant savings. Some £2.4 billion was the anticipated spend, but that has now been reduced to £1.8 billion. The Minister may be able to persuade me otherwise on the rollout of the digital element of the service, and I would like to hear him on that subject—but, if not, I am really worried that we are cutting this so thin that we may lose the core benefit of universal credit. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock: everybody in this House, or certainly anyone who served in the Welfare Reform Bill Committee in 2012, is committed to the principle of a single working-age benefit that is blind to work. But if the Treasury is not careful, the house of cards will collapse. So if I had succeeded in a fatal Motion and the Minister had been sent back to the Treasury with his tail between his legs, it may have said, “It’s all too much—we’re just going to let you swing in the wind”.
I know that it is not the Minister’s fault at all, but the idea that this is a save-to-spend initiative is a complete nonsense, as far as I am concerned, and I just do not believe it. It is a departmental expenditure limit that will carry these savings and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, said, the claimants will carry the can, on top of everything else. We are talking about £200 million or £150 million—we do not know—but we really are in danger of putting people at risk.
Another thing that irks me is the fact that we are now beginning to confuse means-tested safety nets with income replacement benefits. Means-tested safety nets should apply in any circumstances; they are the point of last resort. I do not believe that the local government establishment, although it tries hard with reduced budgets, can pick up all of the downstream damage that will be done to low-income households that will struggle to stay alive. Therefore, we have to get behind the department to get the Treasury to
recognise a bit more what is at stake here. That is one of the purposes that I hope the debate this evening will serve.
8.15 pm
I am very pleased to see the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, here, because I want to say to him that, despite the fact that, as has been mentioned, there are rising concerns about the procedures available to us in this House to deal with some of these policy issues, the work that his Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee does is exemplary. Even those of us who have been studying this issue for a long while require his help in getting information out of the department. He succeeds in doing that, and the professionals who work for his committee, and the membership of his committee, deserve great credit for doing that. It is boring work, but it is absolutely essential to give confidence to policy-makers on the floor in debates like this that they understand all the issues properly. That is true of Mr Paul Gray and the Social Security Advisory Committee, too; it has always done great work, and I pay both those organisations a great tribute.
I am struggling to understand whether we can get some key performance indicators into the operation of this policy. At the moment, the universal credit payment would normally be paid directly into a claimant’s account within seven days of the last day of the monthly assessment period or as soon as is practically possible. After 3 August, there will be a seven-day waiting period. I am worried about,
“as soon as reasonably practicable thereafter”,
which is a term of art. If these regulations go though, is there some way of monitoring the degree of lateness, if I can put it that way, and whether the six-week, or perhaps even more than six-week, period is observed in practice?
We had this debate about jobseeker’s allowance and employment and support allowance a year ago, and we previewed all these issues. That was a saving of £15 million. It is presumably too early to get any useful feedback from the implementation of that policy, but I would very interested to learn whether, with the new agile computing systems we have, we could pinpoint whether the period that people will be faced with after 3 August is six weeks, six and a half weeks or seven weeks. Over the distance, the House is entitled to ask questions of that kind, as further and better particulars would influence our future consideration of this issue.
We know—the Minister confirms it and he is right—that test and learn is a part of the 2012 legislation framework. I hope that, if these regulations are implemented, we will try to test how we can mitigate some of the effects of these extra waiting days. They will be bound to increase the hardship experienced by people who are subject to the new universal credit regulations. I think the House will want to return to this in future. If the Minister is serious about trying to defend his policy and make it work sensibly, the generality of the people who are claiming will find universal credit much easier to use, but waiting days, particularly on top of Digital by Default, are going to mean that we could damage the proper, sensible rollout
of this policy if we do not pay attention to the bottom 15% of the household distribution who will need help the most. If we do not get that right, the House will be failing households in this country who will suffer in future as a result of these changes.