My Lords, I will add a few comments to what has already been said. I think that Clauses 9 and 10 are terrible. I object in principle, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, to the idea that we can forecast need. I am speaking for myself: I do not know what my party position is or will be, but I am convinced that nothing is more emblematic of the approach of this Government of attacking the working poor and dealing with austerity disproportionately.
That does not mean to say that austerity does not mean to be addressed. The low-income households in this country—in or out of work—will suffer; thankfully, that distinction will become less relevant as universal credit rolls out. I do not think universal credit will come on stream fast enough to help everybody. We have been waiting for the rollout; there are around 155,000 in full compliance with the universal credit system. That will be a much better place to be once the whole country is there but, in the interim, these four years in which we will be freezing these benefits will cost low-income families dear. Why? It is because it is on top of everything else, and I have said that before. One of the biggest disappointments—and I have said this before as well—in the coalition government days was the fact that we did not evaluate the results of the totality of the integrated cuts that were made. That applies to services as well. Now, we are having another four years’ freeze, which is £3 billion or more on top of everything else, without any metrics that begin to contemplate what that might mean for people caught in different, unforeseeable ways by a combination of the cuts.
I have been looking at this area of policy for as long as anybody here, and I am not sure that we will be able to look as far ahead as 2018, 2019 or 2020 with any confidence whatsoever about the conditions that some of these households will face. That is disgraceful and completely unjustified. Of course, the Government are able to found this on the fact that there was a mandate, as it is called, for these measures. Well, there
was certainly not in Scotland—the evidence for that is pretty clear. I have said before in this Committee that I worry about the political aspects of this Bill and some of the consequences that will be felt in the coming weeks and months of the Scottish elections for the next Holyrood Parliament. This Bill will not have escaped the notice of some of the more hard-line nationalists north of the border, which is not in the long-terms interests of the United Kingdom. I am sure about that and feel really cut off at the knees in trying to explain to people north of the border what is going in.
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I understand that for the Conservatives and others of us here, and for people like us, the benefits system is perfect. There is no problem for us; we can cope. We have choices, wealth to fall back on and resilience. We have family and friends, and bank accounts. Yet for the 10%, 15% or 20% at the lowest levels of household income that people must struggle with—and right now, never mind in 2020—it is very different, not just difficult. They have no choices whatever, so this is piling pressure upon pressure. It is absolutely true that in the old days when I used to go to the early uprating debates, as I think I have been doing for 19 years, I was able with some confidence to go home to my then constituency and say, “We are trying as best we can with the resources available to the nation to share the growth the country generates.” Over a period of time, that has changed. The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, is right to point to Professor Bradshaw’s work which tracked the relative fall in the value of some of these benefits. It is stark—it is compounded and it is never won back. It is a perfectly good question to ask whether, come 2020, this Government, were they to be returned to office, would think about relinking benefit increases to general rates of earning. However, even so, they would never make up this £3,000 million or £4,000 million we are extracting from the lowest income working and non-working families. The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, made an important point on working families, too.
I am really angry that we contemplate saying to the lowest two deciles of income distribution, “It does not matter how much growth the country generates, or how much wealth there is in other parts of the system or with 80% of the population.” That is people like me; I am in the retired group. I sit in a house that I bought for £12,000 in 1972, which is probably worth £600,000 or £700,000 now. All I pay is a frozen community charge north of the border, which is de minimis. My generation and people like us sit in an austerity-free zone. That is how I see it. Yet I meet people all the time who are hit left, right and centre in ways they cannot control or choose to avoid. Clauses 9 and 10 are emblematic of this. They illustrate the difference between the Conservative Government’s mandate and approach compared with the coalition Government days, when at least the issues were weighed in the balance. I was not in favour of everything they did, either, but this is too much.
We must reach a point where we say, “Let’s just wait and see how this works out”. If the country trades itself out of austerity, then we should be more generous
and think about re-establishing the link. If the country goes in the opposite direction, of course, there may be more adversity that we all must face. My point is that everybody needs to face it more equally. I do not care what is said: we are not all in this together. If anybody ever wanted evidence of that fact, Clauses 9 and 10 demonstrate that beyond peradventure. I will resist these clauses as strongly as I am able during the rest of the Bill’s proceedings.