Welfare Reform and Work Bill — House of Lords, 2015-12-21
Topic: Social Welfare
Maeve Christina Mary Sherlock (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I will not detain the Committee long as I made clear the Opposition’s approach to the uprating of benefits on the last group of amendments Amendment 97 would allow benefits claimed by carers to be increased in line with inflation. My noble friend Lady Pitkeathley once again outlined very powerfully the problems faced by carers. I commend her brilliant, long and persistent attempts to put these things before the public and Ministers As the Committee heard in previous debates, there must be a real danger that the state will start to penny-pinch its way into driving carers out of caring, leaving those for whom they care to be the responsibility of the state. Throughout this Bill there seems to be little attempt to try to assess the costs to the public purse that might accrue to other parts of government, national or local, as a result of savings in the social security budget. My noble friend Lady Lister, in moving her amendment, advocated a triple lock for child benefit. I very much appreciated the history lesson for those of us who remember going back to where that is. The CPAG warned us that during the last Parliament child benefit lost 13% of its value against CPI, and 16% against RPI. Of course, that is far from the only cut affecting children. The levels of benefits and tax credits for children have faced repeated real-terms cuts. I am using this amendment to ask the Government to do something very specific that they keep refusing to do—namely, to provide a cumulative impact assessment of the effect on particular categories of people of the changes that they are making. Whenever we ask them to do this, they put up two defences. The first is that it is all a bit complicated because everybody’s circumstances are different, so they cannot be expected to produce a single cumulative assessment. Well, somehow the Treasury and the IFS have managed for years to assess the impacts of measures on categories of people, if necessary by modelling them in relation to different household sizes and compositions. We would be happy to get that The Government’s second argument is that you cannot just consider benefits, you have to consider all the other wonderful things the Government are doing, such as the national minimum wage and tax allowances. That is fine. Include those in the models as well and we can all see who will be better off and who will not as a result of the combination of all these effects. A variation on that defence is that it is too hard because of the dynamic effects of the Government’s wonderful welfare reforms. Translated, that means either the Government reckon that universal credit will make people better off or that they are going to make them so desperate that they will have to work because they will have no other choices. In neither case have the Government produced enough evidence, let alone hard evidence, that can be included in modelling and put in the impact assessment, because the evidence is not there—so they just say that it is all a bit hard I have tried repeatedly to get the Government to do this, as have other noble Lords, and we are getting nowhere at all. But there comes a stage where if the Government keep bringing forward legislation which repeatedly attacks the same people, and do not do this, there is a significant democratic deficit. It is hard to know how this House can begin to understand the implications of what is being done when the Government simply refuse to give us the evidence to do it. So I urge the Government to take advantage of this debate to agree at last to address the gaping hole in the evidence and commission some cumulative impact assessments.