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2.15 pm
The Secretary of State for Social Security (Mr. Peter Lilley): I begin by paying tribute to the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith). I had the pleasure to be shadowed by the hon. Gentleman for the past year or so and I came to admire the ability and integrity that he brought to his role as shadow spokesman
on social security matters, which he fulfilled with distinction. I did not think that he deserved demotion in the last reshuffle.
That is not to say that the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms Harman), whom I warmly welcome as my shadow from now onwards, has not fully earned her promotion. I know that she will bring her immense dedication and commitment to her new role and the expertise that she acquired when she was formerly an Opposition shadow spokesman on matters concerning the Department, and during her previous career at the National Council for Civil Liberties. I rather suspect that because of that earlier background she and I may find that occasionally our approach to various matters, including some that will be set out in the Bill referred to in the Queen's Speech--I attach great importance to the forthcoming legislation--with have rather more in common than that of rather more gung-ho Back-Bench Members on both sides of the House.
I welcome the hon. Lady in the particular hope that she will bring the same warm and personal endorsement to our policies on social security as she brought to those on schools. I suspect, however, that if she ever chooses a private pension for herself she will probably still want to force the rest of us into Labour's state scheme.
As the hon. Lady said, this has been a valuable debate. It began with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health, who asked me to convey to the House his apologies for his absence, comprehensively demolishing Opposition arguments about the health service. He set out a positive programme that will be contained in the legislation on primary care following the Queen's Speech.
We had an interesting speech from my right hon. Friend the Member for Brent, North (Sir R. Boyson), who made a powerful statement on education, on which no one is better placed to speak than he. There was another powerful speech from the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), lucid and original as always. He was right in his emphasis on the importance of education and the damage that is done to people by illiteracy. More and more of our studies show that that is a principal reason for long-term unemployment and it is something that we are determined to tackle.
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his support for the Bills that will stem from the Queen's Speech. I can assure him that we shall have the power to tackle more effectively landlord fraud. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the standard acknowledgement letter and its relevance to child benefit. It is no longer of the same importance as he supposes because asylum seekers are not entitled to child benefit. I know that that is opposed by the Opposition, who are keen to take away child benefit from 16-year-olds but want to restore it to asylum seekers.
My hon. Friend the Member for Chislehurst (Sir R. Sims) welcomed the publication of Bills in draft. He made a valuable speech which was enhanced by his knowledge of the problem of child abuse, having been involved in a recent important report on the subject.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead made one of the most lucid and knowledgeable speeches in the whole debate. [Interruption.] I should have said my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mr. Merchant). The two hon. Members have a great deal in common, and I am sure that there will be great Conservative victories in
both constituencies in the next election. It was a speech informed by my hon. Friend's great knowledge of fundholding practices and it was very valuable.
The hon. Member for Vauxhall (Miss Hoey) made some brave remarks on guns. She has shown courage on many issues. She raised the issue of asylum seekers, particularly in her constituency, where, as she knows, I have some connections and get some first-hand arm twisting on a Sunday. I shall draw her speech to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health, who is directly responsible for personal social services and local authority involvement in that.
My hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Mr. Bottomley) made another genuinely original and practical speech about his approach to changing social attitudes without coercion.
There were other original contributions to the debate. The hon. Member for Antrim, South (Mr. Forsythe) mentioned the danger of bad neighbours and spoke about the need for legislation in that area. I particularly welcome his warm support, which I echo, for the staff of the social security office in the Falls road and his condemnation of those who threaten them when carrying out their duty to provide benefit for those in need.
The hon. Member for Peckham will already have recognised the supreme importance of the subject that she is now shadowing. It is important not just in this country but worldwide. Reform of social security is the cause of crisis in the coalition in Germany. It has been the cause of riots and demonstrations and strikes in France. It is important because it is so large. It has grown--as I never tire of pointing out to the House--to the point where it costs every working person in this country £15 every working day. That is why we have set out a programme of reform. As well as those contained in the Gracious Speech, the additional Bills will bring to a total of 12 the Bills that we have introduced in the course of the reform programme that I initiated. I believe that it is essential for any Government or anyone pretending to be capable of governing this country to be willing to undertake the very difficult task of reforming the welfare system and not to pretend that it can all be done by mirrors or by spending yet more money.
As we have been going about the process of reform, we have become increasingly aware of two limitations on our legal powers. First, there are legal restrictions on our power to cross check data that we hold about social security claimants with data that are available to the Inland Revenue or Customs and Excise. We have developed powerful computer programmes to cross match data within the Department. It is sensible now to try to apply those techniques to cross checking data between Departments. The public already give us this information, so we are not talking about a further intrusion or burdens on them. It is only right that we should be able to cross check and establish, where there is a suspicion, whether people are working at the same time as claiming benefit.
The second area where our powers are limited is in the handling of housing benefit and council tax benefit. It is, after all, the responsibility of local authorities to handle those benefits. Therefore, they are responsible for stopping fraud. It is the most blinding complacency for the hon. Member for Peckham to suggest that the record of local authorities has been satisfactory and that the only shortfalls are those of central Government, which does not
have direct responsibility. The fact is that, until I introduced rewards and punishments for local authorities, the record was even more deplorable. We have achieved a doubling in a single year and a further increase since then. Surely the hon. Lady must accept that there are still local authorities that are not putting as much effort or bringing as much expertise to bear as is needed to prevent housing benefit fraud. That is why the Bill will give us powers to establish an inspectorate and to require local authorities to obey its recommendations. The inspectorate will also be able to inspect the performance of different parts of the Benefits Agency and to offer its advice and expertise to enhance our efforts.
We want to be positive throughout the public sector, but it is important to begin where the need is greatest, as the hon. Member for Peckham frankly admitted. However, most of the Labour party's proposals on the subject are absolute nonsense, which is why she joined her predecessor in signally failing to try to justify or flesh out any of the figures previously published by Labour in its proposal to reduce spending by £1 billion in order to spend that money elsewhere.
The second Bill in our portfolio is on compensation recovery. A key principle in which we believe is the encouragement of responsibility. When employers or others are responsible for accidents at work, the company or its insurers, not the taxpayer, should foot the bill, and we are introducing legislation to ensure that that happens. The victims will be allowed to keep in full the compensation that they receive for pain and suffering and taxpayers will save about £40 million. The overall effect will be to encourage safety at work by giving employers more responsibility, to give a fairer deal to victims and to ease the burden on taxpayers.
In the coming year we intend to build on our programme to get people from welfare into work. I spelt out recently at a seaside resort some imaginative new measures to bring that about. For the first time, we will involve the private sector in the provision of services to help lone parents in particular, and later other unemployed people, back into work. Private firms will compete with Government teams from both the Benefits Agency and the Employment Service. They will be paid by results, so that they will make a profit only if they succeed in helping people back into work and keeping them in work, thereby saving taxpayers' money; it is a win-win-win situation. The proposal is positive, and I am astonished that the Opposition have chosen to rubbish it outside the House and to ignore it within.
The Opposition are right to recognise that the most intractable problem is getting lone parents back to work. That is why we have initiated the parent plus programme. I congratulate the hon. Member for Peckham on having today relaunched the out-of-school-hours child care programme that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Employment has been implementing with great success. The programme has already created about 72,000 extra out-of-school-hours places for an investment of about £48 million and we intend to spend nearly £20 million more to boost it further. I see no difference between the hon. Lady's proposal and what we are already doing.
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