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Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold) (Con): I would like to acquaint my hon. Friend with my constituency case of Mrs. Little, who tried for months to get the Child Support Agency to take some notice of her claim for her four children. When eventually the CSA took notice of it, it wrote back to apologise for the fact that the computer had broken down. She was told that her claim would have to be dealt with manually and it would be another 20 weeks before she would receive any money at all. Does my hon. Friend regard that as acceptable?
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. We are now getting into special pleading, and I urge the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson) not to pursue that path.
Mr. Waterson: I feel for Mrs. Little, but I will resist the temptation to follow that path in too much detail, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
Let us return to the chief executive and the Secretary of State giving evidence to my Committee about the overall performance of the CSA. In his usual skilful fashion, the Secretary of State tried to draw the fire away from the chief executive and himself by announcing at the beginning of the evidence that Mr. Doug Smith would be leaving the CSA—to spend more time with his family or some such reason. That was on 17 November 2004. The transcript was read to me by several BBC journalists, and I accept that no one said expressly that Mr. Smith would be leaving quite soon, but I must admit to being pretty surprised to find that he is still in post, apparently barricaded in his office at the CSA and saying, "I'm not coming out."
Alan Johnson: I distinctly remember the hon. Gentleman being present at the meeting, so perhaps he will recall my saying that the current chief executive would be handing over the reins to the new chief executive, which suggests that the new chief executive has to be appointed before the old chief executive moves on.
Mr. Waterson: I am certainly not suggesting that the Secretary of State was trying to mislead anyone, but I was left with the distinct impression that it would not be a lengthy process and that Mr. Smith had had enough, that the CSA had had enough, that its clients had had enough, and that the Secretary of State had certainly had enough. I leave aside any speculation as to what useful tips Mr. Smith might be able to pass on to his successor in handing over the reins. As I understand it, there has not exactly been a queue of qualified applicants for this particular job, but I express my surprise that Mr. Smith is still there, rather than facing new challenges in another job.
Andrew Selous:
Does my hon. Friend share my surprise, given the CSA's recent history, that Mr. Smith was awarded a CBE in the new year honours list?
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Mr. Waterson: It is not for me to second-guess Her Majesty in these matters. In any event, there is no greater honour than being the chief executive of the CSA, and Mr. Smith seems intent on clinging to that for the time being.
I turn to the debacle of the overpayment of tax credits. As my hon. Friend the Member for Havant noted, many hon. Members encounter this matter at their constituency surgeries, and in correspondence. People with delicate family budgets face real hardship as a result of this problem. What is being said to people about their overpayments? That question was asked earlier by the hon. Member for Roxburgh and Berwickshire. How many claimants of income support or income-based jobseeker's allowance are on reduced incomes as a result of the recovery of overpayments? If the Minister does not have the figures to hand, I should be grateful if he would write to us.
What steps are being taken to ensure that income support claimants know that the Inland Revenue has the discretion not to recover overpayment in cases of hardship? I remind the House that it is my party's policy to introduce an amnesty in respect of most cases of overpayment. After all, the overpayments are not remotely the fault of the claimants themselves.
I do not want to repeat the arguments that have already been made about incapacity benefit, but as my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) said, some elements in the Government's proposals—such as those to take away some of the stigma associated with the title of the benefit—are to be welcomed. However, the number of people on incapacity benefit has risen significantly under this Government. The present proposals apply only to new claimants, and contain nothing that affects the 2.7 million existing claimants.
Will the Minister confirm that in 1997, 47 per cent. of people claiming incapacity benefit were unemployed, and that that figure has risen to 60 per cent.? Will he also confirm that the number of people leaving incapacity benefit has fallen, and that as a result, the number of claimants has risen by 140,000 since May 1997?
I now turn to questions arising from the new incapacity benefit system. It was stated earlier that under the new system, severely sick or disabled people would receive more money. However, the rates for the new benefit have not been set yet. What evidence will be used in deciding the rates paid under the new regime that will replace incapacity benefit? What assurances can the Minister for Pensions give that sick and disabled people will not lose income under the new scheme? Will the Department set expenditure targets for the new rehabilitation support allowance and the disability and sickness allowance? How long does he envisage that it would take claimants on rehabilitation support allowance to move beyond the basic rate, which is paid at JSA levels, and reach the higher levels equivalent to long-term incapacity benefit?
The separate issue of economic inactivity is one of those dialogues of the deaf, which we seem to have regularly in the Chamber, between Ministers who are happy to crow and issue press releases about the headline level of unemployment, but are reticent in talking about the large number of people in this country who do not find their way into those statistics because
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they are economically inactive. The crying shame, as my hon. Friends have said, is that more than 1.1 million young people are neither working, studying nor training. When will the Government have a proper thought-out strategy to deal with that lost generation, which is apparently doing nothing and is not included in the unemployment figures?
While I am on the subject of employment and unemployment, it is worth quoting what Labour Market Trends concluded this month:
"while unemployment levels have generally been increasing over the past four years, the rate of increase has been no more than in line with population growth, leaving the trend in the employment rate largely flat since 2000, following stronger growth through much of the 1990s".
That is the context in which all employment and unemployment issues should be considered. The Government do not have some great success story; they are simply talking the credit for a trend that has been flat since 2000, and is based on the successes of the 1990s.
On pensions, the quote given by my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire bears repetition. The Prime Minister told the Liaison Committee recently:
Presumably on planet Blair, they are not. However, we know that at least half of pensioners are on means-tested benefits and that the proportion is destined to rise inexorably under this Government's policies, subject to one issue to which I shall return.
We know that the latest figures show that one in five of the poorest pensioners are not claiming the means-tested assistance to which they are entitled. During the past three months, only about 30,000 new people have signed up for the pension credit. Despite all the bally-hoo, all the advertising—which I see regularly in my local paper in Eastbourne—and all the efforts of the Pension Service, which is doing an excellent job in my area, the application rate is tailing off. As Gordon Lishman of Age Concern said recently:
We are all hanging on the final report of the Pensions Commission—the Turner commission—which, sadly, will not be available until after the election. It has spotted the effect of means-testing on pension provision in this country.
Alan Johnson: The hon. Gentleman is behind the game, because the splendid new Blairite shadow Secretary of State sitting next to him has announced that the pension credit will rise at the same rate as earnings until 2008, so the argument about people being sucked into means-testing is meaningless, given that that system would continue under both Conservatives and Labour.
Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that when the Select Committee of which he is a member went to Glasgow to talk to the splendid Pension Service about the main reason why people say that they do not want pension credit, it was told that the reason was not stigma, but because people say that they have enough money and do
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not need any more? Will he confirm that that was the biggest single reason for people not taking up pension credit?
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