My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 45, tabled in my name, and I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for supporting it.
As Members will be only too aware, the £20 uplift to universal credit has ceased. A number of faith leaders, including myself, wrote to the Government alongside many other people seeking for that decision to be reversed. The response was the assertion that helping people back into high-quality, well-paid jobs is now the priority.
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In order to achieve that objective—which is one that I know everyone in your Lordships’ House will applaud—it is necessary for those seeking such jobs to be suitably trained and qualified, especially if the economic and social shock of the pandemic means that they now need to change jobs for new ones or to completely retrain to meet new demand. Indeed, an early survey by Adecco in June 2020 suggested that just under one-third of employees were considering a
career change post pandemic, and a further 16% had already embarked on some form of training during lockdown with that goal in mind.
Being able to access high-quality training is crucial to those aspiring to the high-quality, well-paid jobs that are rightly the Government’s objective. That was a consistent theme in the excellent points made by a succession of speakers of day 1 of Report, whether in relation to green skills and jobs, by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, or the need to increase the skills of our whole workforce, by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and many others.
It is no good having such opportunities available in theory, but finding that those who face the greatest challenges are, in practice, unable to take them up because they simply cannot afford to do so or the current eligibility criteria in effect exclude them from doing so. Among that cohort, people who are reliant on universal credit face particular difficulties in accessing such high-quality training. That is partly because the default setting for universal credit is that the client must not be in education, since support for that comes from the separate and quite distinct system of loans and grants designed for their needs—as the very helpful and recently updated policy note puts it.
As noble Lords will be aware, it is of course true that there is provision in specified circumstances for courses to be treated as a work preparation requirement for UC claimants up to a maximum of 30 hours per week in certain categories, which allows time for claimants to fulfil the other work-related requirements of their UC conditions. However, the briefest glance at the government regulations for UC that refer to education, or at the government guidance on claiming UC if you are a student, immediately showed just how complex the rules are in practice. That guidance also clearly shows how being available for work is a requirement of being able to claim UC regardless of the educational commitment, which can prove an insurmountable barrier for prospective students.
The present procedure allows a course of education to be included in an individual claimant’s work search requirements when that is approved by the claimant’s adviser. Such a request is frequently successful. However, while it is reassuring that, in some cases, education can be included in work search requirements, the fact that this is on a discretionary basis remains a cause for concern for prospective students, not least because they are reliant on their universal credit income. The uncertainty that this creates, along with the complex regulations that must be applied correctly, serves as a disincentive to many claimants to actually pursue the education that will get them into the higher-skilled work.
In addition, according to information provided by the Association of Colleges, there is a recurring issue whereby UC claims are incorrectly refused in the case of young people living independently, who are eligible to pursue full-time, non-advanced education within UC, due to the system assuming the education to be advanced. There are also significant problems facing prospective students who need financial support for accommodation or subsistence, which are either excluded
from current funding or insufficient in scale. Rereading this and explaining it shows just how complicated the system is currently.
However, the good news is that a potential solution is already in the Government’s hands. In broad terms, the amendment in my name seeks to give practical effect to one aspect of the Government’s lifetime learning guarantee—a commitment that we fully and warmly support. More specifically, until the end of this month, the trials of the intensive work search programme, which is available throughout the UK and lasts 16 weeks, and the 12-week skills boot camps, which are available in England, show that it is possible to offer full-time provision as part of that lifetime skills guarantee. In addition, the Kickstart programme has been so successful that is has now been extended until March, with some 69,000 young people starting Kickstart jobs since September 2020.
Plainly, the effectiveness of these approaches needs to be properly confirmed. In any extension of UC eligibility for learners who are retraining or changing career, proper safeguards will be required to prevent abuse of the system. For example, it has been suggested that those who have obtained a recent qualification—say, within the last five years—might be ineligible for further full-time study if in receipt of UC.
The purpose of this amendment, though, is simple and straightforward. It is to enable those in receipt of universal credit to access the skills and qualifications they will need for the future, and thereby access the high-quality, well-paid jobs that the country needs to rebuild our economy, to help create a fairer and more just society, to help them and their families to flourish, and to fulfil the very purpose for which universal credit is said to exist.
I know that the Minister is acutely aware of these issues and look for reassurance that the Government are equally aware and, more importantly, committed to finding further new and creative ways to maximise incentives for those wishing to acquire new skills and take up high-quality, stable jobs and who currently rely on universal credit for all or the majority of their income.