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Ms Lynne: The hon. Gentleman obviously realises that 1 million pensioners are not claiming the income-related
benefits to which they are entitled, so they receive only their basis state pension and do not get housing benefit. Does he agree that it is time that an advertising campaign was run to make sure that pensioners are aware of the income-related benefits to which they are entitled?
Mr. Nicholls: I am mostly with the hon. Lady, but we cannot assume that, simply because people are not claiming everything to which they are entitled, they must be living in poverty. I am not privy to whatever claims the Queen Mother makes on the state, for example, but it is just possible that she has not claimed anything other than her retirement pension. One wishes her well, and she is not living in poverty.
The figures need to be examined. I agree with the hon. Lady, and I am conceding no more than we have already conceded, that the Government spend considerable sums advertising the availability of state benefits. I remember--it is a long time ago, so it shows how long that has been going on--playing my part as a Minister in such advertising campaigns.
My final point may sound like an entirely local problem, but it has a national application. In the west country, we have been visited by people who sound as though they are fugitives from "Blue Peter," because they rejoice in the names of Melody, Happy and Swampy. They have spent much time underground, although they are not retired miners trying to relive the old days. They come from outside the area, and, for the most part, have no confidence in the democratic process as represented by environmental inquiries, unless the democratic process happens to accord with their views.
Those people believe that they can claim the benefit of a democratic system when it goes their way, and treat it with complete contempt when it does not. They descend on an area where for years local people have been hoping for a bypass, as it would transform the quality of their lives. There is no hon. Member with a rural seat, and possibly no hon. Member with an urban seat, who has not seen how a well defined and well judged bypass not only enhances the environment, but transforms the life of the local community.
Local people, who at long last have seen the A30 Feniton bypass becoming a reality, suddenly find that a group of people who, for the most part, hold their views in contempt and have taken no trouble to find out why local people wanted the bypass, put the state, in the form of the police and so on, to massive sums of public expenditure to remove them from below the ground.
So far, so good. One listens to such people on the wireless. To say that they do not grasp the argument does not impugn their sincerity. One might take a laissez-faire attitude and ask whether it matters that the police have to spend time getting rid of them. The answer is that it does matter, because it takes those policemen out of my constituency. The worst part is that it is done on state benefits.
I do not know whether there is a ministerial line with which my hon. Friend has been supplied or is about to be supplied. It will contain phrases such as, "Minister cannot be drawn on this. Minister does not have information about individual circumstances. Minister must be careful of confidentiality. Minister, if he is really pressed, can say that this information would be too expensive to obtain."
There are two principal qualifications for Swampy, Melody, Happy and their friends: they must be available for work, and they must be actively seeking work. One is not actively seeking work 25 ft down under the putative Feniton bypass with a steel gate over one's head. That is in no way being available for work. If it is true--I say if, because I do not know for a fact--that initially social security officers were going out on site to hand over the benefits, that is an outrage.
If people want a thoroughly bizarre life style, if they want to live in the community while at the same time reserving to themselves the right to hold in contempt the procedures and principles of that community, in a democratic society they are entitled to do so, but they are not entitled to do so by living off the money that would otherwise go to look after the frail, the helpless and those who genuinely need a helping hand.
Mr. Alan Howarth (Stratford-on-Avon):
The hon. Member for Teignbridge (Mr. Nicholls) seems to believe that, if one privileges the wealthy, one will have what he calls a decent society. I believe that, until employers value those who work for them and until we design pathways that enable people to proceed from welfare to work, we will not have a wealthy society, and we certainly will not have a just society.
The Secretary of State claimed that the policies that we are debating are designed to encourage people to move into work, but I fear that in reality more people will live in anxiety and hardship, and that they will have little reward for taking up work; in some respects, they may find it harder to stay in work.
The Government propose to remove the 50 per cent. subsidy in housing benefit for the difference between a notional reference rent and the actual rent payable. They also propose to restrict housing benefit for single people under the age of 60 without children to single-room rent levels.
That policy will hit large numbers of people who are unemployed or disabled, carers looking after people in another household, widows, as my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham (Ms Harman) stressed, and people who are separated or divorced and do not have their children with them.
We know from a parliamentary answer that 430,000 people under 60 in single-person households are renting in the private sector, but only 70,000 of those are in single non-self-contained rooms. It follows, therefore, that some 360,000 people will be threatened by that policy and will experience apprehension, difficulty and a deterioration in the quality of their lives. Their homes represent their security, dignity and privacy, and the possibility of having some control over their lives.
It reflects a harshness and a lack of humane imagination that the Government are willing to deprive people in middle life, living by themselves on modest incomes, but probably making a valuable contribution to society in
activities such as nursing, caring or teaching. Such people are to lose their homes. That is extraordinarily harsh. I hope that the Government are still prepared to think again.
Single people have fared worse than others in recent years. They are disadvantaged in the housing market. They wait for long periods, and may wait interminably, on waiting lists. They find it harder to service the cost of mortgages. The policy that the Government are introducing will ensure that single people stay in relative difficulty.
Relative poverty matters. The failure of the Conservative party to understand imaginatively how people feel about relative poverty and the widening inequalities that have become apparent may explain why there is such disillusionment with the Conservative party.
The policy previously applied to people under 25, restricting their housing benefit to cover only the cost of shared accommodation. The Government justify their extension of that to people under 60 on the grounds of consistency and fairness. Last year, however, when they sought to justify the reduction in housing benefit for single people under 25, they claimed that it was acceptable and appropriate because single people under 25 were in different circumstances in life--they were at a stage of life when they would have more flexibility. The Government cannot have it both ways, and shifting their ground in such a way constitutes a mockery.
Moreover, the Government are extending the policy up the age range to cover people aged between 25 and 60, without, as yet, having evaluated the impact on those under 25. I suspect that they felt impelled to go further because the existing policy had not helped their fiscal position as much as they had hoped. Even before seeing reports on the impact of the policy, however, we can be pretty sure that supply will fail to match demand: there simply will not be the amount of non-self-contained property available for rent that the policy assumes. Rents will rise, and the Government will receive little, if any, fiscal gain. They will merely have caused hardship.
Disabled people are likely to suffer particularly as a result of the restriction of housing benefit, because they may need more living space than others. They may need wheelchair-accessible homes, and space in which to store equipment. The Government should have considered that problem. As it is, they have dithered over the proposal to extend part M of the building regulations to private accommodation, although there are some very good models that they--along with local authorities and developers--could use. The "lifetime homes development" on the Woodlands estate, developed by the Rowntree Trust on the outskirts of York, shows that it is possible to produce beautifully designed housing that is accessible to disabled people--housing in which people can remain throughout their lives--at a minimal additional unit cost. The Government should give a lead, because there is currently an appalling shortage of accessible homes. There are about 80,000 at present, but there are 4.5 million people with mobility problems.
As things are now to be, disabled people will have to leave homes that they have had specially adapted, because they will no longer be able to afford the rents. A disabled facilities grant may have helped to pay for the adaptations, but apparently that money is to be written off. The policy
means that fewer disabled people will be able to live independently, as they wish and ought to be helped to do, and it makes a mockery of the Government's professions in regard to care in the community. It makes one wonder why they introduced legislation to allow social services departments to make direct cash payments to disabled people so that they could manage their own personal and domestic assistance. If those people do not have the means to pay the rent, they will not be well placed to organise their households.
I believe that the policy is, if not in breach of the letter, certainly a violation of the spirit of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. In effect, it constitutes an indirect discrimination, because it will exclude disabled people from renting in the private sector. The Government make some discretionary funds available to enable councils to provide help in certain limited circumstances, but even in that regard they have tightened the rules governing eligibility to benefit. Instead of talking of "vulnerable groups" who may be able to benefit from those discretionary funds, they talk of people being in "exceptional hardship".
The Government have not required information about the availability of those discretionary funds to be supplied to disabled people. They have not thought about helping people who may need assistance so that they can negotiate to obtain support. At the very least, there should be a clear instruction to those who administer housing benefit to ignore income from disability benefits that have been provided to cover expenses other than housing costs. I understand that no such instruction has been forthcoming so far.
The Government's housing benefit policies will also introduce new disincentives to work. If a person loses his job, the review of his housing benefit will be brought forward. The hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) mentioned that a person in those circumstances would be allowed to retain his previous level of housing benefit for 13 weeks, but thereafter there will be a review and the housing benefit will be cut. The new policy will be a real deterrent to people who might be minded to take temporary work or, perhaps, to try out some new kind of employment in an experimental way. It will deter those who are prepared to risk taking on a job that they realise may be insecure. Such people will feel less confident, because they will know that, if things do not work out, their housing benefit will be reduced sooner than it would have been otherwise.
The policy, then, discriminates against not only disabled people but the unemployed. It will be impoverishing, because people will lose not only their jobs but their homes. The ethos is that, the poorer people are, the less they should get.
The freezing of lone-parent benefits is a triumph of harsh moralism over humanity, and of dogma over realism. The Government's assertion that the social security system favours one-parent families does not stand up, and the common sense that tells us all that that is not so is supported by scrupulous research carried out by the Policy Studies Institute--the research of Berthoud and Ford, published in their paper "Relative Needs". In 1992, 78 per cent. of children in lone-parent families were living on or below income support levels, compared with only 18 per cent. in two-parent families. The Government's own publication "Households Below Average Income" tells us that lone parents constitute 11 per cent. of those
in the bottom income decile, but only 6 per cent. of the population. There is clearly disproportionate poverty among lone parents under the existing social security system.
Reducing one-parent benefit will again reduce incentives to work. It is a non-means-tested benefit, which a lone parent is able to claim in full when in work. Far from being tilted in favour of lone-parent families, the benefits system is tilted against them in certain important respects. In the case of jobseeker's allowance and income support, the claimant's partner can work 24 hours a week, but a lone parent can work only 16 hours a week on income support. At the very least, the Secretary of State should suspend the changes until he has seen the results of further research. He has acknowledged that the research that has been done is not definitive or conclusive in all respects. Proper research should be carried out before he embarks on any reduction in benefits, or in the relative value of benefits for lone parents as opposed to couples.
That is particularly important, given all the evidence that income support is not sufficient to meet children's basic needs. The Child Poverty Action Group's publication "Cost of a Child" makes that abundantly clear. We need a strategy to assist lone parents to move into work. We need a reform of benefits, and, of course, we need the provision of affordable, good-quality child care. The Department's own research--contained in "Moving Off Income Support", by Shaw and others--shows that lack of child care is the real barrier preventing lone parents from going to work. A high proportion want to do so, properly and naturally, although some will feel that, during this phase in their lives, their first commitment should be to home and children. Many both want and need to work. Two thirds of them say that the cost of child care is the real problem that prevents them from achieving that.
Lone parents also face other problems. They are rather more liable to lack educational qualifications. Because of their situation, they are more likely to lack recent work experience, and they run into the difficulty that, as yet, all too few employers are family-friendly in their employment practices. Faced with all those difficulties, lone parents need imaginative policies to help them to get into work, to have higher incomes, to float their households off poverty, and also to increase their opportunities to participate in and to contribute to society.
The Government will say that the child care disregard in family credit is the solution to the problem, but only 25,000 lone parents benefit from it. The lowest-paid on the maximum family credit gain nothing from the disregard, as they cannot receive more than the maximum benefit. The disregard does not apply to children over 11. Often, lone parents cannot take advantage of the disregard because they are, understandably, required to use approved child care facilities, which often are not available in the hours when lone parents need them if they are looking to do shift work, or evening or weekend work. Much more thought and imagination need to go into assisting lone parents in that regard.
Lone parents who are unable to work more than 16 hours have no child care disregard at all on income support. The earnings disregard on income support has been frozen since 1988 at £15. It has been shown by the Department's research to be too low to offer any incentive for lone parents to try out work. As an early priority when resources can be found, the Government should raise that disregard to £25, bringing it into line with the disregard
on housing benefit--the amount that working lone parents on housing benefit can earn before their benefit is reduced.
The Government should also redress another anomaly--this time to the disadvantage of couples--that they have created between lone parents and couples. Today, one in five households of working age in Britain have no one in work, as my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham reminded the House, and I share her anger about that. The £15 disregard for long-term claimant couples under 60 has been reduced by the Government to £10. Is that all that they can offer the one in five families who are out of work--to cut the amount that people can earn before they begin to lose benefit?
The entitlement for people who previously received invalidity benefit has been frozen for two years, so they are that much poorer because of inflation in that period. New claimants are on lower benefits, and the Government aim to save £3 billion by 2000. The Government have to recognise, however, that almost everyone in receipt of incapacity benefits has passed the all-work test. The Government cannot then claim that such people are the malingerers, the lead swingers, the workshy of their mythology, about which we heard so much when the Government introduced the incapacity benefit legislation.
The Government claim--the Secretary of State said it this afternoon--that they are focusing benefit on those who are genuinely unable to work. How can that be so if they are making reduced payments to those who have passed the all-work test and are demonstrably unable to work? Instead of removing entitlement and reducing incomes, they should concentrate on encouraging and helping incapacity benefit claimants to try out work.
That could be done, for example, by relaxing the linking rules, so that people can have more confidence to try out a new job, in the knowledge that if, for good reason, it does not work out, they will still be able to return within a reasonable time to their previous level of benefit. At the moment, they have only eight weeks in which to take that risk. That is not enough, particularly for disabled people, who are bound to find it harder to explore the job market, and face greater difficulties in finding work that is appropriate for them.
The Government should also, as the hon. Member for Rochdale (Ms Lynne) argued, be more generous in the provision that they allow for people to undertake therapeutic work. At minimal cost, such reforms could be introduced, and it would quickly save benefit expenditure.
The Secretary of State said that the Government are proud of the provision that they are making in social security, yet one cannot but feel that the Conservative party is resentful of the money that is spent in this way. Claimants are certainly made to feel unworthy, and are stigmatised. The vast extension of means-tested benefits--the proportion of the social security budget that now goes on means-tested benefits has doubled--means an extension not only of stigma but of poverty traps and a multiplication of disincentives.
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