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Baroness Miller of Hendon: My Lords, at this point I can only beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
[Amendments Nos. 113 to 117 not moved.]
Clause 49 [Work-focused interviews for partners]:
Baroness Turner of Camden moved Amendment No. 118:
- Page 57, line 15, at end insert "connected with types of employment suitable for that person"
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, Clause 49 makes full entitlement to a number of benefits conditional upon work-focused interviews for a partner. Regulations may make provision for a requirement for the partner of a claimant to take part in a work-focused interview as a condition of benefit continuing to be payable to the claimant. Among the benefits which could be adversely affected if the partner does not comply are not only income support and jobseeker's allowance but also incapacity benefit, severe disablement allowance and invalid care allowance.
I sought amendments to this clause in Committee. I have very strong misgivings about this provision, and these were not assuaged by the reply given in Committee by my noble friend Lord Bassam, the
Minister. Nor am I alone in having doubts about the clause. NACAB has voiced some concerns, as have a number of other organisations.Of course, the Government maintain that this measure is not intended to bring pressure to bear on the partners of claimants to accept employment. It is simply a question of letting people know what opportunities for employment are available. The Government will no doubt maintain that the intentions are entirely benign. I am sure they are. However, I doubt that they will be seen in that light by claimants and partners. There may be very good reasons why a claimant's partner does not want to accept employment: there may be children to be cared for; there may be children with disabilities or behavioural problems; the couple may take the entirely laudable decision that one of them should devote himself or herself to a child.
Of course, the Government have claimed, as they did in Committee, that benefit will be adversely affected only in a minority of cases, and then that not all the benefit, but only a percentage of it, will be lost. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, referred to 20 per cent. But people who are dependent on benefit are poor anyway, and the loss of even a part of it is a serious matter.
I do not like this clause at all. Why should a claimant risk losing benefit simply because his or her partner fails to attend for an interview? However, we seek, as we have throughout our discussion on this Bill, to be constructive, and our amendment simply seeks to soften the impact of it. We say that the work-focused interview should be connected only with types of employment suitable for that person, so that there should be no pressure on people to take whatever employment is available simply in order to reduce the benefit that would otherwise be paid. Clearly, it would cover the position of anyone responsible for the care of young children. That is one of the aims of this amendment.
I hope that the Government have given further thought to the arguments that we advanced in Committee and are now able to respond sympathetically to our amendment. I beg to move.
6 p.m.
Earl Russell: My Lords, we are considering three amendments under Clause 49. It may save the time of the House if I make remarks relating to all three amendments—otherwise, I may have to repeat the same points three times and the House may become a little tired of that.
This is one of a series of measures that the Government seek to introduce, dealing with the withdrawal or partial withdrawal of the right to social security benefit. We have considered it for some time. As a party, our position on it is clear. The Government justify it on the ground of linking rights and responsibilities. They say that the right to receive benefit carries with it the responsibility to look for work. Taken in isolation, that is not a particularly controversial statement. The trouble is that
responsibilities are a whole cat's-cradle of different matters that relate to each other. To take one relationship between rights and responsibilities in isolation is a little like taking a single stitch out of a garment and trying to exhibit it in a museum—you end up making a little bit of a mess.Over and above any responsibility that recipients of benefit may have to look for work is the over-arching responsibility of the state to protect those whom it governs. The responsibility of the state is to preserve the lives of its subjects. It has been agreed since at least 1601, and probably a good deal longer, that that responsibility does not extend only to providing external defence. It also involves a responsibility to protect people against the effects of famine, poverty and other matters that may threaten their lives. If we take that away, we deprive the subjects concerned of that which binds them to a contract to obey the state. In fact, we turn them into outlaws. That can be an imprudent process.
Therefore, granted that the state is entitled to some sanction against those on benefit to abuse their position, that sanction must fall short of any measure that lowers them below the subsistence level. It is, therefore, a little unfortunate that the Government have absolutely no idea what the subsistence level actually is. The present level of benefits is based on work done by Beveridge, extrapolated in 1948 from work that he had done before the war. Any relevance to present standards of poverty levels or subsistence levels is, therefore, almost purely coincidental.
We have previously debated this point on social security Bills. An amendment was moved by the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Manchester, on the need to research a minimum income. Our party policy is that when that research has been done, there will be a case for reducing benefits, where people misbehave, down to the level of the minimum income, but no lower. That is a vital distinction. At present, the Government cannot tell us whether or not they are meeting that condition. That is one fairly serious objection to the proposal in this clause.
The Minister may tell us that it is only such-and-such a percentage and therefore does not matter, but she will not know whether what she says is true. She will hope that it is, but she will not have any solid research base on which she can rest it. For this Minister, that is something rather unusual, and one would imagine that she must find that a little uncomfortable. The Minister shakes her head. I await her reply with a great deal of interest. She will have to justify that shake of the head.
The other question to be considered is the effect of the introduction of a measure of this kind. We should not introduce any measure without understanding roughly what kind of effect it is likely to have. On that, so far as I can understand, we simply have not the first idea, because we have not the first shred of information.
There are two theories on what may be the effect of disentitlement to benefit. One is the short, sharp shock theory—that it will make people wake up, pull up their
socks, pull themselves together, get themselves a job, and the whole list of slogans that go with it. I may describe the other as the theory of throwing out the lifeboat—that it leaves people to drown. Until we have clear research evidence taken from a reasonable sample of people who have been subjected to disentitlement to benefit, we have no idea which of those theories is the case. To introduce a measure such as this, without any idea of its likely effects, is politically irresponsible.We have a certain amount of anecdotal evidence, which indicates that it may cause extreme distress. However, we have no research about the level of debt among people on benefit. The Reverend Paul Nicholson keeps drawing our attention to this subject, which is the cause of a great many uncomfortable proceedings in magistrates' courts. We have no information on whether there is any connection between disentitlement to benefit and the level of indictable offences. We have one study, carried out by the University of Wales for South Glamorgan Tech, which discovered that among those in South Glamorgan aged 16 or 17 and not on income support, the word "shopping" means shoplifting. That may create a suspicion that such measures represent a temptation to increase crime. It would be nice to know whether that is actually the case. By itself, it is a slender piece of evidence, but it raises a question that deserves an answer.
We have no information on the correlation between disentitlement to benefit and the level of hospital admissions. We have no information on the correlation with the level of suicides. Only from private research by Crisis do we know that 347 people died among the homeless on the streets of London in 1993. I am fairly certain that your Lordships will not find that in any figures from the Department for Work and Pensions. The Government are therefore asking us to buy a pig in a poke.
We have here three different amendments. The first one, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Turner of Camden, has just spoken, invokes the other end of the network of rights and responsibilities, which is a part of the principle of subsidiarity. My right honourable friend Mr Kennedy has said that the way in which we raise our children is a private matter, not the state's business, and that the state is not the most competent judge of when and in what circumstances people are capable of going off and doing a job and the children are capable of flourishing. The state cannot judge whether the childcare facilities and the journey to work are compatible. Only those who are doing it every morning can judge whether they are two compatible journeys.
I shall not again remind the Minister of the speech made in our debate on single parents by the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Parkside. It was a moving speech. She remembers it perfectly well and I shall not take her through it again. But this lower end of the network of rights and responsibilities, which is implied in the words of the amendment about work "suitable" for the persons concerned, is also vital. So what the
Government have done is taken one particular bit of the network of rights and responsibilities and attempted to isolate it from all the rest as if the rest did not exist. You really cannot do that; it does not work. Our amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Razzall would exempt from that those who receive all the various disability benefits.Here, again, what people with a disability or a physical handicap can do is in the last resort something only they can answer. Very often when one knows people who are subject to a disability, one is equally surprised both by the things that they can do and by the things that they cannot do. We cannot know exactly how much pain a particular series of manoeuvres causes to someone with a bad back. We cannot know how regularly they are able to do something which they may be able to do occasionally. In the end these must be matters for individual judgment; they cannot be matters for conscription. So, again, here the authority of the state is limited. That is the thinking behind our amendment.
We also have a considerable degree of sympathy with the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Hendon, to leave out Clause 49 altogether. But I look forward to hearing the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, speak on that in due course.
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