Welfare Reform and Work Bill — House of Lords, 2015-12-14
Topic: Social Welfare
Archibald Kirkwood (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, perhaps I may make two points on this very important subject, which will become more important as universal credit comes to be rolled out. That will happen significantly over the coming months and it is causing fear and anxiety that the sanctions regime, which at the moment affects individual benefits, as colleagues know, will start to be applied on a much wider scale on a wrapper which contains within it six benefits. The stakes are therefore a lot higher and, as I said last week and as the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, mentioned, I am getting strong signals that people are worried about universal credit, in a way that I hoped they would not be because of the extra 1 million people who will be embraced on full rollout. In steady state, universal credit will bring that new degree of conditionality, so we need to be careful to answer some of the questions that have been raised Some of the casework that we have heard about obviously needs to be thoroughly investigated, and we need to try to deal with that as much as we can. However, the issue for me is about working with interest groups, such as Gingerbread and others, to try to bridge the gulf—and it is a gulf at the moment—with what the Government say is actually happening. The noble Baroness, Lady Evans, did a valiant job against the clock last week in trying to set out what the Government believe to be the circumstances. I would just report that that explanation, while done in good faith, was met with incredulity by some of the specialists working in this field. It may be that they are dealing with families which are predisposed to the risk of the sanction effect, particularly in the lone-parent client category. But we really need to try to bridge the gap between what the Government think is happening and what the pressure groups, which we have all worked with for years and whose judgment I trust, feel is happening before universal credit gets too much further rolled out I am in favour of a review of the generic kind suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. Speaking for myself, what really needs to happen concerns decision-makers, particularly skilled and experienced decision-makers. The problem is that the people who I get access to in Jobcentre Plus offices are more likely to be experienced because, if I was the departmental manager, I would want visitors such as me to see experienced hands and I have been doing that for a long while, so I have factored that in. I am presupposing that the training and guidance have been rolled out properly; the departmental expenditure limit makes that harder and harder but the explanation of the noble Lord, Lord Freud, last week, which I accepted, was that you can front-load the staff because you save money on administration with the technology. But I am absolutely convinced that these decision-makers with experience are skilled and savvy enough to know whether a case in front of them is missing essential evidence. I do not think that they have enough discretion at the moment about freezing the application until they are satisfied that they have the information in front of them The trouble is that these cases are visited on them through the technology system, so they are not able to see the case all the way through in the way that case officers could in the old days. Jobs get passed around the system, which is technologically clever and efficient, but that deprives the decision-makers of being able to say "Look, there’s something missing here. I want this attended to, and within two weeks I need this other information. If it is absent, their sanction will be applied but if we can find it, I’d be much happier". I do not think that that flexibility exists I know that the guidance is all online and people can see it, and that it all makes sense when read in a cold situation. But in a hot family situation, an experienced decision-maker should be given more latitude in looking at the papers which they have and estimating what other evidence, which because of their experience is likely to exist somewhere else, would make a difference. That would save a lot of money in successful appeals, which would be spawned once the evidence was received, and make the client’s experience a whole lot better. There are things that could and should be done, but my plea, as it is all through the Bill, is that we have to get these things straightened out to the best of our possible ability before universal credit is rolled out to 7.7 million households across the country by 2020 or thereabouts.