Welfare Reform and Work Bill — House of Lords, 2016-01-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Margot Aline (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, in moving Amendment 8 I shall speak also to Amendment 11. Once more I have the support of my de facto noble friend Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope. I am also grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, who expressed his support when moving his amendment. These amendments bring up the rear of his amendment but complement and cement it. We do not know what will happen to his amendment in the other place but, because it is partly based on the need to take account of what is happening to children in working families as well as in workless families, it is important that we still debate it The purpose of these amendments is to balance the obligation introduced by Clause 4 to report data on children in workless households with a similar obligation in regard to children in low-income working households. As I argued in Committee, whether the primary concern is life chances, as in the Bill, or child poverty, which Ministers assure us they are still committed to eliminating, it cannot make sense to exclude from reporting obligations the two-thirds of children living in poverty in households where at least one parent is in paid work. Indeed, in the mean time the Prime Minister has repeated his welcome pledge of an "all-out assault on poverty". Surely an all-out assault has to include this group. It is therefore appropriate that the poverty and disadvantage experienced by families with a wage earner should be included in the life chances reporting obligations The fundamental importance of the issue to the Government’s life chances strategy and assault on poverty is one of the reasons I return to it on Report. Its importance is underlined by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission in its latest State of the Nation report. It states: "A One Nation country would be one where work offered a guaranteed path out of poverty", and it documents how it fails to do so. As I said in Committee, the amendment has the support of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and End Child Poverty The other reason I am returning to this issue is that I was not satisfied with the Minister’s response to the arguments put in Committee. For instance, I specifically asked him to answer a question posed by my noble friend Lady Hollis of Heigham at Second Reading: how will the Government account for the poverty among children of working families? His response had been to refer to the continued publication of the HBAI statistics, which was welcome, but he did not give an explanation of the lack of any reporting obligation on this matter to ensure accountability with regard to in-work poverty. He still did not provide a satisfactory explanation under questioning in Committee The Minister pointed out that the current situation of the majority of children in relative poverty living in a family where at least one parent is in paid work, "has developed over the past couple of decades due to the improved progress in tackling poverty in workless families".—[Official Report, 9/12/15; col. 1586.] That is fair enough up to a point but is no answer to the question in hand, nor is the fact that the risk of child poverty remains higher among workless households. Whatever the trend or the reasons for it, and whatever the relative risks, it does not absolve the Government of the responsibility to report to Parliament and the country what is happening to children in poverty, regardless of their parents’ employment status If the Government are reporting only on children in workless households, they will distort the overall life chances picture and the policy responses. Given that paid work is held out as the route out of poverty and the universal credit’s objectives, surely the Government will want to know what is happening to those who have set out on this route and to analyse any obstacles they encounter In Committee, we engaged in a textual analysis of the Government’s own publication An Evidence Review of the Drivers of Child Poverty worthy of an academic seminar. In the end, it all seemed to come down to whether, in its reference to "low earnings"—I note that the Minister carefully omitted reference to that part of the report yet again in his earlier responses—as a key factor, along with worklessness, that impacts on children’s life chances, "low earnings" was in brackets. The Minister seemed to suggest that, because it was in brackets, that meant low earnings "out of worklessness". I was not sure what he meant by that. I have gone back to the original source and it is clear that the key passages contain no brackets To recap, the table on page 6 listing "Relative influence of factors on length of child poverty spell" is headed by "Long-term worklessness & low earnings". The review spells out that, "lack of sufficient income from parental employment … is not just about worklessness, but also working insufficient hours and/or low pay" Page 9 states: "The key factor for child poverty now is parental worklessness and low earnings" Page 56 summarises the key finding: "Long-term worklessness and low-earnings are principal drivers of child poverty and the key transfer mechanism through which the majority of other influential factors act" Note the "and" and the "and" and the "and" The significance of what we, in shorthand, call "in-work poverty" is not surprising, given the nature of the contemporary labour market. A new analysis of the Poverty and Social Exclusion survey by Professor Nick Bailey of Glasgow University shows that, "one in three adults in paid work is in poverty, or in insecure or poor quality employment" Using various measures of in-work poverty, he found: "one in six is in poverty on the low income measure, one in three on the deprivation measure"— we spoke on a previous amendment about the measures being about deprivation as well as low income— "and one in six on the combined PSE poverty measure" Professor Bailey wrote: "It is particularly striking that a large minority of the working poor are working full time and/or live in a household with near full work intensity so that it is hard to see how more work can be the solution to their problems" He also notes that, for a substantial minority, what he terms "exclusionary employment" is an "enduring condition" Surely this is the kind of analysis the Government would want to draw on to balance and contextualise their focus on worklessness, not least given the extent to which parents on low income move in and out of paid work and worklessness in what has come to be known as the "low pay, no pay cycle". Indeed, the fluidity of the dividing line between paid work and worklessness, which universal credit in effect recognises, makes a nonsense of a life-chances measure that ignores one side of the disadvantaged labour market position of low-income parents When I withdrew my amendment in Committee and warned that I might return to it on Report, I finished by saying that perhaps by then the Minister would have come up with some more convincing arguments than he had done hitherto. However, I realise that I was being rather unfair to him, because I do not believe that there are any convincing arguments, so how could he be expected to do so? Instead, it would be refreshing and welcome if he were able now to accept this amendment—which, after all, allows the Government to define their terms—or, if he prefers, to undertake to bring forward a government amendment at Third Reading to achieve the same end. I beg to move.