Benefit Changes: Vulnerable People — House of Lords, 2019-06-27
Topic: Labor
Anthony Robert Greaves (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, my noble friend Lord Kirkwood said what a privilege it was to follow such an expert as my noble friend Lady Thomas. I have the privilege of following them both. They are both experts in this area; I am not. I shall make a few general comments from the perspective from which I see this—casework in my role as a humble local councillor, in which I see people who get into real difficulties and need help sorting it out The role of jobcentres—Jobcentre Pluses, as they are now called—has changed in the many years since they were set up as labour exchanges. I have two anecdotes. The first is about a mother with two young boys. Her partner had moved out quite some time previously but was now homeless. To get his benefit, he had to put down an address. He gave the address that he used to live at with this lady and her children and, as a result, she had her benefit stopped because they said that he had moved back in. It took months to get such a little thing, which was nothing at all to do with her, sorted out. Clearly he was not living there, but that is what happened. She had a part-time job but was not getting tax credit. It got to the stage where she kept her children off school because she was not entitled to free school meals as she was not on benefits. She could not afford their dinner money or to heat the house properly, so they were being kept in bed all day. It was sorted in the end but it should not have taken so much time and trouble The second example is of a fairly elderly gentleman who suffered from mental difficulties and could not get out of his flat. He was not able to admit strangers into his flat and therefore failed to turn up for an interview, so that when people did a flat visit he failed to let them in and lost his benefits for a considerable time. Those are just two examples of how Jobcentre Plus people are now not there to help people. In my view, they are there to control them and, too often, to penalise and sanction them When the labour exchanges were first set up in 1909 by the great Liberal Government, they were a tremendous step forward because they meant that jobs could be advertised for free by employers in a central exchange where people could go to find out what there was. Before then, a lot of people simply had to tramp the streets from one mill to another, or to a factory or whatever, knocking on the doors and saying, "Have you got a job, please?" The exchanges were not perfect and faced a lot of political opposition from the Tories and the Labour Party at various times, but overall they were a great success. They were turned into employment exchanges, which was largely a change of name, and then into jobcentres, where the administration of the benefits system and the system of advertising jobs were put together I wish any noble Lord who wants to go into a so-called Jobcentre Plus with a client now the best of luck. You would first have to argue your way in—to argue that you are allowed in with somebody to help them. If you overcome that argument, you would then find that the centre is actually a means of administering the benefits system. These centres do two particular things to people. First, they will try to put them on training courses, some of which are on how to apply for jobs. In my experience of talking to friends about them, many of the courses provide training in doing things that those people will never be able to do well. If they manage to understand things such as managing a simple spreadsheet, they will never get a job that requires that kind of training. However, there may be others that are more useful Secondly, people have to spend a lot of time applying for jobs online and proving that they have done this. Instead of tramping the streets, as people had to do before 1909, they now sit at computer screens applying for jobs—we all know that people who advertise jobs now get large numbers of applications—which, in most cases, they will never get. There is a huge amount of wasted time and effort in the system. As I said, I do not believe that the fundamental job of a so-called Jobcentre Plus is helping and supporting people any more; it is about controlling and, too often, penalising people I agree very much with everything that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester said about the two-child limit. I have a copy here of the report that he referred to, All Kids Count: The Impact of the Two-Child Limit after Two Years. I recommend that everybody reads that report and wondered whether I should say a few things about it but he said it all. The only thing I want to add is how ludicrous it is that we invite some of the most vulnerable families in the world—refugees from Syria, for example—to come and live in this country, and then impose something like the two-child limit on them Again, looking back in history, the present system goes back to the introduction of the family allowance by the Labour Government in 1946, based on proposals that originally came in the report from that great liberal of the last century, William Beveridge. But when that allowance was originally introduced, it was the other way round. The first child did not get the benefit, as it was assumed that it was the subsequent children who really needed it and that they would be in poverty if a family had more than one child. In my own family, I remember the great glee there was in 1956 when the eldest child in the family—that is, me—became eligible for family allowance. For my mother, that was a great step forward. The point about family allowance was that it went to the mother and was paid in cash every week. That made it an unbelievable addition to the resources that she had. In some families, it meant the children could be brought up—I would not say in relative affluence, but certainly out of poverty in the circumstances of the day I am told that only 60% of universal credit now goes to the main carer, who is usually the woman, but not necessarily nowadays, as we know families have changed. But it is not the same benefit it used to be. We had battles over the years on family allowance and child benefit. I go back to battles in the 1960s and 1970s, and I remember working then with the Church of England and Child Poverty Action Group. Some things seemed to go round and round, and never change. We all ought to unite and campaign, across the parties, whoever we are, to abolish this two-child limit. It really is ridiculous, because it undermines the fundamental principle of the benefit, which is that the resources should go to the children. You cannot say that they should go only to the children of families of two and not to families of four, because families of four will clearly be in more difficult financial circumstances. It is a top priority for this to happen.