 House of Commons |
Session 2008 - 09 Publications on the internet General Committee Debates Welfare Reform Bill Committee |
Welfare Reform Bill |
The Committee consisted of the following Members:Liam Laurence Smyth,
Committee Clerk † attended
the
Committee WitnessesMartin
Narey, Chief Executive,
Barnardo’s Tim
Nichols, Press and Parliamentary Officer, Child Poverty Action
Group Eddy Graham,
Welfare Rights Specialist, Child Poverty Action
Group Fiona Weir, Chief
Executive, One Parent
Families/Gingerbread Kate
Bell, Head of Policy, One Parent
Families/Gingerbread Professor
Paul Gregg, Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of
Bristol Public Bill CommitteeTuesday 10 February 2009(Afternoon)[Mr. David Amess in the Chair]Welfare Reform BillWritten evidence to be reported to the HouseWR
01 Age Concern and Help the
Aged WR
02
Barnardo’s 4
pm
The
Chairman: Good afternoon everyone. I welcome the
witnesses, one or two of whom have probably given evidence before. For
those who have not, I will say what I said this morning. There is
nothing to fear; Members of Parliament are here simply to gather
evidence from you. We hope that you will relax and enjoy the afternoon.
Will you please introduce
yourselves? Kate
Bell: I am Kate Bell, the head of policy at the
single parent organisation,
Gingerbread. Fiona
Weir: I am Fiona Weir, the chief executive of
Gingerbread. Eddy
Graham: I am Eddy Graham, a welfare rights worker at
the Child Poverty Action
Group. Tim
Nichols: I am Tim Nichols, the press and
parliamentary officer at the Child Poverty Action
Group. Martin
Narey: I am Martin Narey, the chief executive of
Barnardo’s.
Q51
The
Chairman: Excellent. Going from my left to right, will you
now please each give us your general observations about the Bill? There
are a lot of witnesses, but you may take as much time as you like,
because parliamentarians will listen to what you say and your comments
will spark various
questions. Kate
Bell: Fiona can speak for our
organisation. Fiona
Weir: We have a wide range of concerns about the
Bill, a number of which come from our perspective as a single parent
charity that not only inputs into policy debates affecting single
parents, but is very much a provider of employability training. A huge
amount of what we do is about trying to get single parents back to
work. Our concerns are focused on a number of main areas, one of which
is how to get the right balance between the parenting responsibilities
that parents have, and their need to get into a job and to obtain help
to get their family out of poverty.
A second area
of concern runs through parts of the Bill. While we agree with the
thinking around getting children out of poverty, and while we very much
welcome the Government’s commitment to that, it is very
important to ensure that work really is a route out of poverty. Several
aspects of the proposals give us concern that single parent families
will not find a route out of poverty, but will instead join the ranks
of the working poor, or
will face problems such as cycling in and out of benefits or low-paid
jobs, with detrimental impacts on their families. We are
also—partly from our own experience of what works, and partly
from our respect for much of what has been achieved in the past decade
to get lone parents into jobs and to improve the employment rate
significantly, which has happened through a mixture of incentives and
the removal of barriers—very concerned about the shift from
incentives towards an approach that is very much based around
compulsion. We have particular concerns about the impact of sanctions,
in terms of both the hardships that they would cause to families that
are already vulnerable and at severe risk of poverty, and the kind of
discretionary powers that are to be given to advisers. We think that
they could be detrimental to building the kind of relationship that is
needed if you are going to encourage people back into work. We also
think that they could create a real risk of unjust and inconsistent
approaches. Those are our main concerns, in top-line
terms. Eddy
Graham: The Child Poverty Action Group shares a lot
of Gingerbread’s concerns. The first thing to talk about is the
format of the Bill. We said that it was not so much skeletal as
invertebrate, in that it grants an awful lot of powers, such as for the
Secretary of State to abolish income support for any group of people if
he considers it expedient or necessary. What is expedient might not be
necessary or wise, and we are concerned about the Secretary of State
taking a power to remove the entitlement of vulnerable people to claim
income support before we know what system will replace it. The powers
that are being granted and the lack of draft regulations, unlike with
the previous Welfare Reform Bill, for which extensive draft regulations
were published, cause some
concern. Much
of the Bill is about increasing conditionality on claimants, lone
parents, and sick and disabled people, yet there is nothing about
benefit adequacy. We are primarily concerned with the eradication of
child poverty, but simply increasing conditions on benefit claimants on
its own will not meet the 2020 target. There is nothing in the Bill
about increasing benefit adequacy so that claimants who are forced to
claim benefits for long or short periods can live on a reasonable
income. We are opposed to increasing conditions on people for an
insufficient level of
income. On
the extension of contracting out, although the Bill does not remove any
benefit claimants’ rights to appeal, it does move them one step
further away. It places more decisions and directions in the hands of
contractors and will leave claimants with less to appeal or complain
about. It is not clear from the Bill what claimants will do when they
have disputes with contractors about the action plans that they are
drawing up or directions that they do or do not want. The Bill retains
the right for claimants to appeal against benefit sanctions, but a lot
of decision making takes place before that. We are concerned that, in
effect, there is an eradication of people’s right of
appeal.
Tim
Nichols: I would like to add just a bit to what Eddy
said. I want to make it clear that CPAG very much supports the
potential that work can have as a route out of poverty for parents and
children, provided that it is
high-quality, well-paid work. We certainly would not want our criticisms
of the Bill to be misunderstood as opposition to that in any way, but
we have concerns about the effectiveness of the approaches being taken
and about the Bill’s impact on
children. Financial
sanctions on a family will have consequences for the children in the
family. There are potential conflicts between some of the possible
directions and parental caring responsibilities, and we are also
concerned about the potential of the welfare to work agenda to drive
child care strategy too
much. We
think that the needs of children have to trump everything. The
Government’s child care strategy has to be at the top and other
things must follow it. In terms of effectiveness, the Bill leaves
claimants with very little ownership of the process of gaining
employment support. The large majority of claimants want to get into
decent work. We would prefer to see a system that nurtured that
ambition much more and worked in a more positive way with that
potential, and that is part of the reason why we are one of the
organisations that has suggested that this is an opportunity perhaps to
look at ideas around a claimants charter so that a claimant would feel
that they had an entitlement to high-quality, personally tailored
support, rather than it being something imposed on them through a quite
bureaucratic sanctions regime. As somebody who was once a long-term
benefit claimant and experienced the new deal, I know that no matter
what things look like on paper, the feelings that you have as a
claimant and your personal experience of the process as it plays out
are extremely important to its success.
We have
concerns about the amount of time that is being given for consideration
of the Bill in Committee. After the evidence sessions, there will be
only six sittings. I believe that there were 12 sittings for the last
Welfare Reform Bill. Given how much will be left to regulations, we are
not sure that there is enough time really to scrutinise the
Bill.
Martin
Narey: I have sympathy with much of what has been
said, but Barnardo’s takes a somewhat different view. It is
important that that view is not caricatured; we are not suggesting that
the vast majority of people who are unemployed or out of work do not
want to get into work, but we believe that many of them need help and
assistance to get into work. We do not shy away from the fact that a
small minority needs pushing into work. We have some sympathy with the
conditionality aspects of the Bill, particularly the emphasis given to
getting those on long-term and incapacity benefits back into work. I
say that on the basis of not only my experience running
Barnardo’s, which works with about 120,000 children and young
people, but, and perhaps more significantly, my previous experience
running the Prison Service.
When working
with offenders, which I did for 23 years, I was constantly
struck by the worrying number who believed that the world of work was
simply nothing to do with them. They came from families with parents
who had not worked. Indeed, there is some evidence now of young people
in families in which work has not been a factor for three generations.
Work can provide a route out of poverty—although not always, and
it is a real problem that 60 per cent. of children living in poverty in
the UK have one or both parents working—and it also improves
self-esteem and self-worth. A child
growing up in a family in which one or more parents work is much more
likely to think that the world of work, a potential career and getting
on in the world is something to do with them. The number of young
people in the UK who think that jobs and careers are things that people
like us do is a real worry.
Q
53Mr.
James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con): I would like to ask
about the position of lone parents with younger children, which is a
very important aspect of the Bill. We will perhaps start with Fiona and
Kate. You have seen the Government’s proposals, which were set
out in response to the Gregg report, on how they see the parents of
children under the age of seven in a progression to work group. After
the children are seven years old, the parents will obviously move from
income support to jobseeker’s allowance. Under this philosophy
of progression to work, those with children under seven will be in a
new group, and lone parents of children of three to six years old will
be “Required
to follow the full progression to Work regime based around Work Focused
interviews, action plans, work related activity and the backstop of
adviser
direction.” How
do you feel about that?
Fiona
Weir: From our experience of working with single
parents, we feel quite strongly that the vast majority want to work; in
fact, nine out of 10 say that they want to work when it is right for
their family. Usually, when you unpick that a bit, there are very good
reasons behind their choices on work, and 40 per cent. of lone parents
with children under seven are already in work. Those who are not
working often have very good reasons: sometimes it is skills and
confidence, sometimes a lack of access to the right child care, and
sometimes a different set of barriers relating to the particular needs
of the children. Fundamentally, what is required is a system that
really provides support on skills training and building confidence, and
good provision of child care, but that essentially leaves the decision
about when it is right for the family for the single parent to return
to work up to that single parent.
We have
learned from our experience of what works that the relationship with
Jobcentre Plus advisers can be extremely positive and supportive for
helping a lone parent on the route to work. However, you take the
element of trust out of that relationship if there is the potential to
sanction that lone parent for not undertaking particular work-related
activities. What constitutes a “work-related activity” in
the Bill is wide open and it is also very unclear what would or would
not constitute a reasonable sanction. You must consider the experience
in the US. There, when an adviser has been given discretion to apply
sanctions, an element of racial bias has often come into decisions,
along with other issues. That all adds up to a system that, instead of
working with the desire that many people have to get their children out
of poverty and to get themselves back into work—because they
want the adult company, to be a role model for their child and so
on—somehow becomes very distrustful and based on a small number
of people, rather than the vast majority of people who want to
take the right route for their family. It then becomes a system that is
working not with people, but against
them.
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| ©Parliamentary copyright 2009 | Prepared 11 February 2009 |