Examination of witnesses (Questions 80
- 99)
TUESDAY 21 APRIL 1998
RT HON
FRANK FIELD,
MP, MR
JONATHAN TROSS
and MR DAVID
STANTON
80. Minister, you have talked about success
measures and you have just explained why certain success measures
can be misleading; there are technical, almost philosophical,
problems about some of them but there must be an idea in the Department
on the issue of poverty what would be a clear success measure.
In the last Parliament, a Parliamentary Answer to me showed that
a third of babies in Britain are born to families either drawing
Income Support or Family Credit, so a third of babies if you like
born into poverty. What proportion will it be at the next election?
(Mr Field) I have no idea what it will be and
I would argue with you that you should not actually get over-concerned
about that. A large group of people who are on Income Support
will be single parents. The meaning of single parents has changed
during my lifetime of campaigning against poverty and being in
this House. When I first started area the meaning of single parents
was clear, they were literally single parents, but that is not
always the case now. Whether some people should be claiming benefit
who have the status of being single parents is questionable. If
I am right, then it gives less meaning to the importance that
you are attaching to the number of babies who are born into households
on benefit. I would much prefer us to look at, as the Health White
Paper does, low birth weight babies. We know that birth weight
is attached to income in an inverse proportion. They are born
to mothers in social class I and II. But generally speaking the
younger you are as a parent, and the poorer you are, the greater
the chance you will have a low birth weight baby. With low birth
weight go all the associated problems which are handicap and disadvantages
in future life. So I would turn it back to you, Malcolm, and say
I would have thought we should be much more concerned about the
data we have on low birth weight than primarily concern ourselves
with the number of babies born into households on benefit. One
is a much truer record of what is actually happening at the bottom
of our society than the other one is.
Chairman: Can we turn
to the question of fraud and abuse? Edward Leigh has some questions
in that area.
Mr Leigh
81. Before I get on to that, can I ask one
or two questions on pensions, but before even that can I ask one
simple question? How, and in what specific areas, will your Green
Paper reduce means testing?
(Mr Field) I thought you might ask me that question,
Edward, knowing the nature of your character and how helpful you
always are, giving me a chance to make a point I would want to
make anyway. This is a document which is celebrating universality,
and it gives the commitment any Government can give of its stewardship
during a Parliament. For Governments to talk about future Parliaments
is slightly pie-in-the-sky because, thank goodness, the electorate
take over the reins at a certain stage and decide who is going
to be the Government. For this Parliament we say the two benefits
which most people use, the State Retirement Pension and Child
Benefit, remain universal. We also make a commitment on disability
living allowance. We have tried to take welfare out of the ghetto
and take it back to its original meaning. To link it with well-being
rather than just welfare—talking about education and health
services which we wish to be of first-class quality and very largely
provided in the public domain. This is a huge celebration of universality.
What most commentators have missed—only Anatole Kaletsky
in the Times spotted it—is that there is a great
deal of talk about what this Government would be doing on education
and health and whether the market principles, as with the previous
Government, were going to be extended—there is a very clear
statement in this document that we are not going down that route.
So the answer is that it is a great celebration of universality,
warning against the dangers of means testing but accepting, as
I always do and I am happy to affirm now, that at any point in
time we are concerned about the numbers on means testing but we
are also committed in the short-run to helping the poorest pensioners.
This is the first Government which has begun seriously to look
at how it can locate the million pensioners who are eligible for
Income Support and not claiming it and to work out ways which
will increase take-up. You could say to me that as I am against
means testing, "Should you not be against such a scheme".
If I was a zealot you could, I suppose, think I would misuse my
position in the Department to stop proposals going forward which
are trying to get help to the poorest pensioners in the country,
because that is the only way we can deliver help to them. At the
end of the day we will have increased the numbers on means testing
and you will be able to turn round to me and say, "Given
what you said about means testing, is this not a sign of real
failure". But I would be arguing that you need to look at
the reform programme in the round, over the decades. Where it
is appropriate to use means testing, such as we are doing now
to help the poorest pensioners, that programme has my full support.
82. That is all very well, Frank, you said
it is a great celebration of the universal principle, fair enough,
and you said, "We are not going to means test pensions and
Child Benefit", but the last Government were not doing that.
So I do not quite see what huge progress you have made beyond
what the last Government was already committed to.
(Mr Field) For the simple reason that whereas
your Government was open to the charge, which it had to regularly
refute, that it was going to means test State Retirement Pension
and Child Benefit, this Government has made the clearest possible
statement in the Green Paper that it is not going to do so.
83. Okay, we will move on to pensions. Chapter
4, page 35 of the Green Paper Cm 3805, reminds us at the top of
the success of occupational pensions and the £800 billion
invested, and the bottom of the page reminds us that at least
3.3 million pensioners receive help through Income Support, which
is not a very satisfactory situation. How, specifically, for the
present, and we will ask questions about the future in a moment,
do your plans help these people?
(Mr Field) I do not think the figures there give
a break-down. If you look at the take-up rate and the amount claimed
on Income Support, Housing Benefit and the Council Tax Benefit,
what you find is that the more generous the benefit is in giving
help to individuals the higher the take-up rate is. The specific
help we will be bringing to those figures is hopefully to increase
them, because there are a million of the very poorest pensioners
who do not claim Income Support. Some of them, we think, will
be claiming Housing Benefit. Hence the pilots we have announced
in which we will work with local authorities, looking at their
Housing Benefit returns to see to what extent we can trace those
who are probably eligible for Income Support as well. The best
local authorities do actually tell people that it looks as though
they are eligible for Income Support, if they claim, but leave
it there. We all know what official letters look like, the way
they are produced they are not the easiest things to read, and
we do not know whether people take much notice of them. My gut
feeling is that those who own their own homes are those who are
least likely to be claiming means tested assistance, because it
is almost impossible to survive if you are on the state pension
and you have rent to pay. There are also those pensioners living
in their children's households and the very old and very frail
who live on a very, very reduced standard of living. We will find
out about that. The specific answer to your question, which in
a way does link in with the first question, is if we are successful
the numbers you quote at the bottom will actually go up.
84. Over the page, page 37 of the Green
Paper, you correctly say, "Personal pensions currently on
offer can be a bad deal for people on low or intermittent pay"
and you say, "In place of poor value private pensions, we
will introduce low cost Stakeholder Pension schemes which will
give low paid workers the chance to save for a decent private
second pension." Maybe you are not in a position to say any
more about that at this stage, but do you want to put any more
flesh on the very simple bones of that statement? I have not found
anything else in the Green Paper about it, but I may be wrong
about that.
(Mr Field) The flesh I would want to put on it
is really what you said in the House in the last debate we had
on this. You yourself did not actually say what the proposals
were, but you set out what the objectives were and the agreement
we should seek to secure success in this area. So I would merely
commend the speech you made to your colleagues. I am sure they
have already read it, but some may not. I thought it was a very
effective speech and there was nothing in it which I actually
disagreed with.
85. That is a very diplomatic answer——
(Mr Field) It is a very truthful answer as well.
86. "Rooting out fraud", Chapter
9 of the Green Paper. You say on page 67 that you are setting
up a group of experts from local government and the private sector
who have been asked to help draw up a counter-fraud strategy.
Can you tell us anything about their work, any results so far,
when they will report or anything else?
(Mr Field) Yes, I can. Maybe I could leave with
you, Chairman, the list of people who have been helping us?[3]
To this Committee it will come as no surprise, for they are either
the special advisers to the Committee, or they were people who
gave evidence to the Committee, in the last Parliament. If I can
just say a few words about that and answer Edward's question.
What has happened is that once in office, we asked the Department
itself to write a Green Paper, a policy document, on how we can
counter fraud effectively. We also asked this group to draw up
what they thought would be the right strategy. We are now at the
stage where both reports and both of the groups are coming together
on the next stage of our document. Again it quite important for
this Committee to know the engine of welfare reform is now the
Prime Minister's working party on welfare reform. Anything of
importance goes to that committee. So this document, when it is
actually completed, will go to that committee for approval. Jonathan,
you are the person responsible inside the Department, do you want
to say anything about the workings of the group?
(Mr Tross) Briefly to say we have, with ministers,
been reviewing the fraud activity that we have been conducting.
We wanted to look at whether the considerable resources which
are now going in are best deployed, whether the balance between
prevention and detection is right, whether we are making best
use of the links between us and other local authorities. Some
of the experiments we are trying to do at the moment are trying
to increase the co-operation between us and local authorities
on exchange of information and linkage of computer systems. What
we will want to do is put together the experience from the considerable
programmes of fraud initiatives we have been running for the last
two or three years, relate that to the input from outside experts,
and see if we can get something which looks more like a strategy
starting from where the areas of vulnerability of risk are, to
show we have a coherent programme of action which is visibly going
to make an improvement in the next three or four years. That,
as the Minister has said, is the task we will be taking forward
under the direction of the Prime Minister's group.
(Mr Field) Can I just say that the role this Committee
plays is very important? If one looks at the stewardship of the
last Government on countering fraud, because of its over-emphasis
on efficiency and cutting costs and its almost denial of what
the Tory Party is usually rather good at, which is interpreting
human nature, the earlier stage of its stewardship was not very
good. This Committee played an important part in forging an all-party
agreement on countering fraud. But it was not until Peter Lilley
was Secretary of State that there was really somebody at the top
of the Department who wished to respond to that debate and do
so positively. So when we talk about moving the debate on, it
is not to criticise the previous administration, because if you
are beginning to try and build measures, control mechanisms, into
the payment of benefit to counter fraud, and you have not been
doing that for a decade or more, it is actually a very difficult
task. So while we will be taking the programme forward, we are
very anxious both to pay credit to the previous regime, or part
of the previous regime under Peter Lilley, and the work he did
and pioneered and to try and maintain the consensus this Committee
created in the House of Commons. So ensuring fighting fraud is
no longer a party issue, it is a serious business, to which all
of us have a duty to address ourselves. One only has to look at
the stories which have been in the press in the last few weeks
about individuals—last week's about one individual with
48 separate identities and us trying to reclaim the capital he
has amassed as a result of this, and at least over-drawing or
wrongly drawing a third of a million pounds. One cannot be happy
with the state of affairs. But to emphasise the change we want
to make is not to take swipes at the previous regime. Because
of the very nature of fraud we have to be always vigilant. Those
who are quite good at it develop their own techniques in response
to the counter-measures that we take. So it is a war which is
not going to be won, but it is our duty continuously to wage that
war.
87. I do not want to take swipes at this
regime either, Frank, but it has to be said this chapter of the
Green Paper, which I have read two or three times, is long on
vague generalisations and short on specific proposals. For instance,
you say in paragraph 7 on page 68, "The Government's strategy
is to shift the emphasis away from detection towards preventing
fraud from occurring in the first place." Something we would
all agree with. Then later in paragraph 16 on page 69 you say,
".. the mechanisms affecting the most fraud-prone benefits
can be revised to reduce the opportunities to commit fraud. In
this way, we will move towards designing fraud out of the system."
We can all agree with that but I still cannot quite understand
what specific control mechanisms you can put in which will achieve
these desirable objectives.
(Mr Field) Let me give you two examples. If we
had wanted to be partisan in this document what we would have
said, and it would have been a swipe at the previous regime, is
that we are getting down to the process of drawing out seriously
what are the risks associated with certain benefits and at what
stage of claiming are those risks most prevalent. We did not wish
to have that sort of swipe, so of course we have opened ourselves
to the charge of vague generalisation because we did not think
making a party point was the best way to advance the debate. We
are in the process now of learning from the private sector and
from one or two of the best local authorities on how we look at
the whole question of risk management of this the biggest of all
the Government budgets. The second area has been a central concern
of this Committee and we denote it in the Green paper. Our worry
about the security of the national insurance number system. Under
the previous regime there were three surveys conducted. One was
by the Benefits Agency itself on securing the gateways, where
they looked at 4,500 national insurance numbers and found that
0.9 per cent of those numbers were attached to false identities.
The second survey was about national insurance contributions and
it found that 4.2 per cent of all contributions, while paid in,
were not being and could not be attached to national insurance
numbers, although the monies were in the accounts. Thirdly, the
Data Cleansing Unit found that 7.9 per cent of numbers were duplicates
or bogus numbers. If one takes what the adviser to the previous
Select Committee gave us, that it is not unreasonable that each
0.1 per cent of misuse of numbers would in fact give a bill to
taxpayers of £170 million of misused funds, and if we are
optimistic that only 1 per cent of the numbers are being so misused,
then we are talking about £1.7 billion. I did not think it
appropriate to try and point the finger of blame at the previous
regime, Edward, because the previous Secretary of State was trying
to get up to speed on this. When you are trying to get up to speed
you cannot do everything at once. There are both intellectual
limitations but also staff limitations. We are building on what
was there but not trying to swipe at the previous regime or, in
the middle of our sentences, putting a "but" in.
Mr Gibb
88. Are you up to speed yet?
(Mr Field) No, we will not be up to speed. We
are gaining speed and we will be wishing to report in the document,
to the Prime Minister which will be published, about what we are
trying to do about securing the gateways. The previous Committee
looked at this. It is easy enough, once fraud is in the system,
to reward people when they manage to root it out. It is much more
difficult to devise a system, while continuing with that system,
to try and put incentives into place so fraudulent claims do not
enter it. It sounds easy enough to do but it is actually quite
hard when you are trying to work out what the performance will
be. The system will build on the previous Government's successes.
We are trying in this area of countering benefit fraud to move
to this more difficult second stage. That is how you reward people
to prevent fraud entering into the system, when most rational
people think you should be doing that anyway, but it has not been
happening. That is not because people have wilfully done it, it
is because most of us grew up in a world where we thought most
people were honest and if there was fraud it was accidental and
smallscale. This is the biggest budget the Government has, it
is probably the biggest budget in the country, and it would be
amazing if very talented, serious people were not making every
effort to get their hands on a large part of it. When we have
a bill, for example, for the poorest pensioners, where if as we
hope we are successful in getting them to claim, it will add something
like £1 billion to our budget, I have no doubt at all that
taxpayers would prefer that £1 billion to be going to the
poorest pensioners and not to people who are wrongly claiming
benefit.
Chairman
89. I have two quick supplementaries on
fraud. You rely heavily, from the Government's point of view,
on the methodology and findings of benefit reviews, and the whole
counter fraud strategy really is based on benefit reviews. We
have been looking at the disability living allowance and there
are some worries about the random sampling basis for the findings
of these reviews, is the Government content that that is the best
basis on which to man fraud investigations? We are also going
to get some information from you on Child Benefit fraud work which
the Committee is looking forward to getting.
(Mr Field) As the previous Committee asked for
it, I hope by the summer you will have it. It is partly because
of the criticisms you have made about how we have used the term
"fraud" and how we might wish to use other phrases in
some instances, that we are actually looking at that data again
before we present it to you. I hope it will be with you in the
summer. You have an inquiry going on DLA and the information you
have is worrying. If one looks at the Advisory Board, the samples
which Professor Grahame took show that on the evidence they had
of the information on the forms, for a very large proportion of
people who were gaining DLA you could not make a decision on the
forms but a decision had been made. The other sample which was
taken showed that there were clearly errors being made about whether
in fact people should be getting benefit or not. You then have
the data from the OPCS survey which suggests large numbers of
people are not claiming who should be claiming. Although I would
urge caution on that—but then you would say I would, wouldn't
I. If Professor Grahame is finding, when he looks at the case
papers from people who have filled in forms to claim and have
gained benefit (and maybe probably should get benefit) but soley
on the paperss he could not decide whether they should, it is
clearly difficult to make that transition. You can see how difficult
it is taking a sample of people who say that they have disabilities
and then, without them providing detailed application forms, move
from that, from the codes which you have for eligibility, to deem
whether in fact they are eligible for benefit. So the whole process
is fraught with problems. The view in our constituencies is that
constituents tell us of people who should not be claiming but
are and large numbers of other people who should be claiming but
are not, and that is not a happy state of affairs.
(Mr Tross) I think the important thing is to start
with systematic evaluations. We started in a world where there
were lots of assertions, so the benefit review process has been
important in starting to bring some systematic evaluation. As
you go down that route, what you find is that things are more
subtle and complicated. You dig around and you get distinctions
between where someone has set out to defraud at the beginning,
where someone has failed to report a circumstance—question
mark, did they know well enough what they were expected to report—and
so on. I think you ask further questions from it. You need to
set it alongside the evidence that you get from the things we
are now doing with more emphasis on verification of evidence,
visiting at the front end. So you want to see the extent to which
you can design fraud out of the system. I think what the reviews
do is to start to give you a solid base for assessing where the
risks are. What comes out of it is a series of things that you
need to follow up, different actions depending on what can be
quite different circumstances between different benefits and between
things that happened initially and happen over time. I think the
important thing is to start with the systematic evaluation.
Mr Pond
90. I just want to stick with the DLA issue
for a moment. I have to confess I have jumped the gun even before
receiving the letter suggesting there are problems in the constituency.
Yesterday I met with disability groups in Gravesham. Each of them
will have received a copy of that chapter in the Green Paper on
disability benefits. When I explained to them what was there their
minds were set very much at rest because there is concern that
because of BIP, the Benefits Integrity Project, many people have
lost their entitlement to benefit and then have been given it
back. They have assumed these two processes are part of the same
thing, the reform process means cuts. Could I urge caution in
that context in terms of the DLA Advisory Board's own findings
which you also refer to on page 55 of the Green Paper, because
when we spoke to the Advisory Board they made it quite clear on
close questioning that in fact the basis of their assertion that
two-thirds of the payments did not match the facts was based on
rather flimsy evidence, in fact it was a rather heroic statement
on the basis of the evidence, and in fact in two-thirds of the
cases they simply did not have the information to make a judgment
one way or the other. That, therefore, implies that their statement
in two-thirds of the cases there is insufficient evidence to support
benefit claims is based on those remaining cases and relatively
small samples. I would like you perhaps to go back and look at
that again because it does cause great anxiety given that BIP
initially, certainly in the minds of some of us, was seen as an
anti-fraud measure to find that there are so few examples that
have come out of BIP, as Baroness Hollis confirmed to us before
Easter, and I think the whole environment of suggesting that many
people on disability benefits are seeking benefits to which they
are not entitled is making it very difficult for them to accept
this process of reviewing their benefits. Could I ask you to look
at that again?
(Mr Field) There are two points there, Chris.
One I tried to emphasise in what I said that they came to the
conclusion that they did not have the evidence on the papers before
them. That did not mean to say that people were not eligible at
the end of the day. Secondly, from my own constituency surgery
I find that people get better and then say "it is appalling
they have taken my DLA away and I have got better, this should
be my reward", whereas the DLA was actually given both to
help people with the extra costs but also in the hope that some
people would actually become better. It is quite an important
lesson. When Lloyd George was introducing the beginnings of the
NHS and sickness benefit it was proposed that it was going to
be a disability benefit and he changed the name because the whole
point was for people wherever possible to get well. He thought
it actually gave the wrong vibes to call it a disability benefit.
He linked the two very closely together, that if you wanted people
to get better then you had to have a proper health service, or
the beginnings of one. You see there are the first moves in the
Green Paper about how we work more closely with the Department
of Health in preventing injuries becoming long-term disabilities
and therefore the costs on lives and on the benefit bill as well.
I only wish to underscore the caution that you urge, but also
to add that nevertheless the reviews do show that there are, in
some instances, considerable changes in circumstances which lead
to people not being eligible for benefit, or at the same rate
when the programme was carried out. That does not of course mean
that in the first place they were committing fraud. Again, I have
to add from my own constituency, and I do not know whether you
have had the same experience, that some of the constituents feel
that we as a Parliament, as a Government, have so failed to police
the system properly. They know people with fewer disabilities
than them getting DLA, they feel now the only way they can maintain
equity is to get the benefit themselves and that there is no way
publicly standards are going to be properly maintained. Part of
the reform process is to maintain those standards and to restore
public confidence. It is worrying when you get the argument at
the surgery "well, it is unfair unless I get benefit too,
I am in a worse position".
Mr Roy
91. Could I ask you to focus in on Part
2 of the Departmental Report, reading the report that in the section
of the New Deal for under-25s that there is no compulsion and
all the rest is voluntary, the initiatives. Can I ask you your
thoughts on why you do not have a compulsion initiative, for example,
on older unemployed people or on lone parents, say for example
with children at high school? The third area I would like to look
at is Part 2, paragraph 28 of the Departmental Report on the New
Deal for disabled people. It has been announced that personal
advisers will be a part of the 12 geographic areas, of which my
area is going to be one of them. Those personal advisers will
speak to people on Incapacity Benefit to get them off benefit
and to get them to work. Will there be an element of compulsion
in that?
(Mr Field) No, there will not be compulsion in
that. Maybe in a moment Jonathan will come in on that. These pilots
are important in themselves, important as a method whereby the
Government tries out reform before it universalises that reform,
but also very important as a prototype of our active modern service.
Jonathan may wish to give a comment on that. The first question,
Frank, was about compulsion and whether schemes were voluntary
or not.
92. The older unemployed.
(Mr Field) I suppose there are really two parts
to the answer here. One is if you are going to exercise compulsion
you have actually got to have the means to enforce it. There is
no point sounding off grandly in these terms if you have not got
the resources to do that. Secondly, I think it is very important
that we actually keep in line with public opinion. On the under-25s
there is overwhelming support in the country that it is crucial
for young people successfully to make a transition from school
and education to work and that a lot of resources should be put
into that and that there should not be an option of staying on
benefit for those who refuse to participate in the range of options
which are present. As Wirral, which covers my constituency, was
one of the pilot prototypes for this I am getting feedback which
suggests, quite rightly, the issue of compulsion is not a big
one. It is helping to change the climate in which decisions are
made. To think that we, as a Government, somehow want to publish
tallies of the number of times we have actually imposed sanctions
would be a sign of failure. As in any household or any community
things work because you do not have to use sanctions. Occasionally
you have to use them because there is nothing left to do. Although
we have given emphasis to it to show in a sense there is a change
of gear, it is really to change the atmosphere within which people
approach claiming benefit. If Birkenhead is any experience, then
the enthusiasm both of young people wishing to participate and
employers trying to play a part in the scheme has even melted
a cold old heart like mine. I am slightly cynical on some of these
things.
(Mr Tross) Just very quickly, two points about
these. One is an emphasis on the increasing use of pilots, experimentation,
in this area. We are into behaviourial influence, how you interact.
I think the sense of trying, testing and evaluating rather than
assuming you have got a national model is important. The other
is a very strong theme in the New Deal and elsewhere of trying
to have active management of cases, encouraging people to look
for opportunities, giving them more advice about their circumstances,
trying to bring services together across some of the organisation
and benefit boundaries that we have had. I think both the experimentation
and active management have been quite strong themes of the work
that I have been involved with.
93. Can I just come back on these trial
areas. I know you are doing them across the country, the Lone
Parents Initiative and the new one that is coming in October.
Is there not a case to look at how these initiatives fare in different
geographical areas? We have a benefit that is the same throughout
the length and breadth of the country but the economic circumstances
are very different depending on what part of the country you are
in. I would be interested in your point of view regarding a universal
payment or a type of geographic payment depending on circumstances.
(Mr Field) There are no plans, secret or otherwise,
that the Government has to introduce regional local benefits.
When this arose in the press it was a total misunderstanding of
what staff were asking for. That was to control their own budgets
and to be able to be totally constrained by the national law in
respect of rights and duties and so on. What is interesting, if
you are looking at different regions and how these programmes
will work, is some work done in Glasgow. Particularly by a person
who works in the housing department, on the difference in local
labour markets and the different successes we may have with Welfare
to Work. Of course, we are looking at that very carefully. One
of the things will be to look at whether there are different success
rates in different areas. It must be easier, must it not, to get
young people into work when you have got an unemployment rate
under two per cent, than if you have got an unemployment rate
above 40 per cent? Can I just give you one example about either
how local labour markets do not work, ie that people have not
got information about jobs, or that there are other reasons at
work. If you travel on the tube, which I do sometimes, you will
see at Westminster, there are advertisements for station assistants
from 18-plus starting at £15,700. If you go along the tube
line and look at the unemployment rates amongst younger people,
in some of the boroughs they are in it is at 30/40 per cent. Why
do you have to advertise those jobs; for there to be such a scarcity
that it actually pays the Underground to publish posters? It is
not one job they have got, they have clearly got a number of jobs.
As I say, that either suggests that people do not have the right
information about where jobs are, which is why Beveridge was so
keen to introduce employment exchanges to give information or
it raises the question of whether enough job information is in
Job Centres for people to draw upon In addition it raises questions
about whether some people think they do not want to do certain
sorts of work, or a combination of these factors.
Mr Wicks
94. At Westminster you would have to meet
journalists and MPs every day on the platform.
(Mr Field) I hasten to add the advertisement was
a general one. Whether you got extra money for having to mix with
journalists and MPs is clearly——— The trade
union organiser there from Croydon would no doubt help you.
Miss Kirkbride
95. Can I pick up on what you have just
said. If that were true, certain people did not want to do certain
kinds of work, what is the Government going to do about it?
(Mr Field) That comes back to the compulsion issue.
We do believe that people have to be serious about making choices.
I am not for a moment saying, and let me underscore this, if all
those particular jobs were filled we would not have an unemployment
problem for some young people in London. But, nevertheless, it
is puzzling with persistently high levels of unemployment amongst
younger people in the capital, in some boroughs, there are jobs
like that that have to be advertised and are not taken.
Mr Gibb
96. Just one very quick question. You said
during your remarks that you wanted to see resources moving from
economic failure to supporting opportunity which reflects really
the wording of Labour's Contract with the People that said in
Clause 1 "We will move resources from the costs of social
and economic failure into education". You talked earlier
about wanting more resources for education and health. What are
your targets then for reducing spending on social security or,
as you said the last time you came to this Committee, curbing
the growth of increase in the spending on social security? What
are your targets, either of producing or reducing the rate of
growth?
(Mr Field) The Green Paper has a very clear commitment
that it is expected that welfare expenditure will grow. It does
not expect the proportion which taxpayers meet to rise disproportionately.
97. If you are only not expecting the proportion
that taxpayers meet to rise disproportionately that still implies
a growth in spending incurred by the taxpayer. How then can you
put forward Labour's Contract with the People, Clause 1, or indeed
your statement just now that you want to move resources from social
security to education?
(Mr Field) It partly comes back to the question
that Archy argued earlier. Historically speaking, over a longish
period of time, the real growth rate has been four per cent. If
you take last year, which is the most favourable year to take,
where we had got rapidly falling unemployment, then the rate of
increase is below two per cent. What is important is to think
about how we measure that growth over the economic cycle. Taking
a particular year can be a very distorting. Secondly, what we
put in the Green Paper ia actually quite a tough commitment. As
national income rises people will spend more on welfare, ie they
will be spending more on education, more on health, and disproportionately
more if you are looking at pension resources which supplement
the state pension. It will vary in different areas. I would not
expect to see a growth in mutual or private insurance for unemployment
insurance.
98. I am concerned about the Government
expenditure because this was a fundamental part of Labour's programme,
that it will reduce spending on social security and transfer it
into education and health. You are in charge of the social security
spending, what are you doing, what are your targets? That is all
I am asking, what are your targets? What do you aim to achieve?
Are you not even attempting to fulfil that obligation that Tony
Blair put to the people during the General Election?
(Mr Field) We are anxious to. Our overall aim
of moving resources from what we call failure to supporting success
remains. One of the issues we have is that very issue in our success
measurements. I still have not got from the Committee a steer
on whether you will be doing an enquiry on the success measurements.
We are anxious to supply you with some papers on that. This will
be one area that we will want to discuss with you further. Not
so that we can come up with some smart answer, so that you think
we have slipped out of the wrestlers, not that you have done this.
We seriously want to look at this issue, which is a fairly complicated
one, and to do it publicly. Just as with Malcolm, who actually
is concerned about issues of poverty, this Committee may make
as one of its recommendations that we should have an objective
on that. Clearly if the Committee makes that as one of its objectives
and in conversation with you we fail to convince you why we think
that may not be the most effective course of action, then we would
have to take that proposal very seriously. I am not saying that
we would follow it but we would take it very seriously given the
work of this Committee. We will be returning to this issue in
the discussions we hope to have with you on the success measurements.
The Green Paper is quite clear. There is a ceiling on the proportion
of expenditure which we will not exceed and within that ceiling
we hope, over the life of the Parliament, to be moving resources
from supporting failure to success. To help us do that the Chancellor
has raised a little over £5 billion of money up front to
try and achieve that particular objective. I emphasise that point
because we are sometimes accused of not being interested in redistribution.
I would have thought that was a considerable amount of tax to
raise and to be used to make that transition a successin a way
which is adding to existing budgets in the Department for Education
and Employment, and ours. to make that transition a success.
Miss Kirkbride
99. What Malcolm is saying about success
and the poverty index or whatever in absolute terms I think is
significant. You did, whilst you were talking about it, talk about
the politics behind it. You also then tried to suggest that previous
discussion on this issue had been something of an area of debate.
That is all very well but it would be fair to say from a Conservative
point of view that discussions on poverty and what had happened
to poverty in Britain over a period of 18 years in power had been
used very successfully by the Labour Party to tarnish the economic
record.
(Mr Field) I never once participated in those
discussions. Nothing that I said could have been contributing
to that debate. I thought it was wrong then. I did not try to
make cheap party points. I believe equally now it is the wrong
approach for the reasons I tried to suggest to Malcolm. What you
cannot fiddle is death rates. If you are looking at the health
of society I think one of the worrying trends is the number of
young men who commit suicide. What is happening there is something
which I think is disconcerting to put it mildly. People do not
fiddle birth weights, that is not on the cards, therefore it is
a much more objective standard of what Malcolm was after. I do
think it does measure living standards over a longer period of
time than just the immediate of what is happening in our society.
From all the work that WYNN's have summarised for us there are
some immediate factors, but one of the factors is the sort of
diet that young women have had during their teenage years. It
is quite difficult to make good that loss in the period just before
or during pregnancy itself. Low birth weight does tell us something
about what has been happening both to income and perhaps, therefore,
eating habits of a very important group of the population over
a longer period of time. I think these indices are much more important
as poverty indices than having what I think is a futile debate,
taking either the Income Support level as a poverty level or,
in isolation, the data on the numbers whose incomes are half average
earnings, for the reasons I said to Edward.
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