Sir Stephen Timms
MP for East Ham · Labour · United Kingdom
“I agree with the hon. Gentleman. If he would like to send me details of that particular case, I will happily look into it. On the subject of people with hearing impairments, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Women and Equalities and I will be meeting the British Sign Language Advisory Board this afternoon.”
“Better outcomes require early identification and support for girls and young women with special educational needs, including dyslexia. That is the aim of the SEND reforms and the development of national inclusion standards.”
“Autistic people and people with ADHD have been struggling to get the right support at the right time. Recommendations from Professor Karen Guldberg’s neurodivergence task and finish group directly informed the SEND reforms that were published earlier this year.”
“The Equality Act 2010 places a duty on public bodies to make reasonable adjustments, so that disabled people are not put at a disadvantage by accessibility challenges.”
“The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. This benefit is there to contribute to the additional costs of disability. Too often, what has happened—my hon.”
“I think we can take the hon. Member’s question as a tacit recognition that in 14 years the previous Government should have done something to fix these problems. The steering group is clear that the provision of cash to meet the additional costs of disability is vital.”
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“The cap has not been changed since 2016, and in 2016 it was lowered. It continues to limit overall annual benefit support for a family to £23,000 in London and £20,000 across the rest of the UK, with comparable figures for a single person of £15,410 and £13,410 respectively. The new cost of living payments will not be constrained by the benefit cap, and I warmly welcome that. I think this sets an important and welcome precedent. It recognises that families up against the cap—and there are over 100,000 of them at the moment—are seeing their costs rising like everybody else.”
“It may well be that the household support fund is playing a valuable role—I imagine it very likely is—but we just do not know, and we should. If there is to be continued use of discretionary funds such as this, instead of uprating benefits properly, the Department must at least work with councils and develop a clear reporting framework for the household support fund to provide assurance that it is being used effectively and that the support is getting to where it is most needed, because at the moment we just do not know. It would be far better to have an effective and reliable system for uprating the level of social security benefits, so that we do not have to resort to these stopgap measures in situations such as the one we are in at the moment. The second point I want to pick out is about the benefit cap.”
“I think that information is supposed to be published, but as far as I can see, no information has been published about how the household support fund has been used. The truth is that we know very little about what has happened to that £1.5 billion. One thing that money could be used for is supporting families with no recourse to public funds, some of whom have been in a desperate situation in the last two years. When asked if the household support fund can he used for that, given that it is a public fund, Ministers—absurdly—say that local authorities should take their own legal advice to find out. At the very least, there must surely be clarity about what councils are allowed to do with this funding.”
“One third of the grant is to support households that include a child, another third is to support households that include somebody of state pension age and the balance is for everybody else. It is for support with food, energy and other essential living needs. In a so-called exceptional circumstance, the household support fund can be used to support housing costs. Local authorities have to submit a statement of grant usage to the Department with plans of how they are going to spend the money, and they are supposed to maintain an adequate audit trail for how they do in fact spend it. We asked the Secretary of State about that at the Select Committee last week, and she told us that local authorities have to make two returns a year to the Department about what happens to that money.”
“Benefit payments urgently need uprating so that people who cannot work can afford to live off them.” The Select Committee has agreed to look at the longer-term issue of benefit levels in an inquiry in the coming months, and we will be considering these issues carefully. I want to comment today on two specific features of these estimates. The first is the household support fund. As I have said, the Chancellor’s package included an additional £500 million for the household support fund, bringing the total amount in that fund to £1.5 billion since October 2021. It is administered by local councils in England, and each council sets its own eligibility criteria. The grant conditions set by the Government are, frankly, pretty vague. They specify that assistance can be issued by the authority itself or through a third party.”
“We have asked Ministers to explain the reason or thinking behind setting the benefits so low, and all we have been told is, “Well, we uprated it that year, we did not uprate it that year, and this is where we’ve ended up.” There is no rationale for the situation that we have found ourselves in where, in real terms, the level of benefits is at its lowest for more than 30 years. Citizens Advice North Lancashire, one of the organisations that contacted the Select Committee, told us that “one-off payments are not a solution to inadequate benefit levels.” It is right about that. It went on: “Our detailed research…on Universal Credit from across Lancashire…shows that Universal Credit is not enough to live on in Lancashire.”
“That is a consequence of successive policy decisions over the last 12 years. The chief executive of the Resolution Foundation said yesterday that the headline rate of benefit for someone who is unemployed is now 13% of average earnings, and that that is the lowest level it has ever been. That is lower, I think, than when Lloyd George introduced unemployment benefit for the first time in 1911. Nobody should be surprised that so many are having such a hard time; there is no resilience in the support that is being provided, because the level is now so low.”
“Universal credit can be updated quickly, as we saw when lockdown hit, but the legacy benefits cannot be. The permanent secretary told the Select Committee last week that the problem is that uprating programs can only be run at weekends, when the computer systems are not doing other jobs, and that is apparently why it takes such a long time to implement the uprating of the legacy benefits. We have already called for those older systems to be improved urgently, and for the gap between assessing inflation and uprating benefits to be reduced. The need for that to happen is now even clearer, given the problems that we have run into this year. The crisis is also exposing a much bigger and longer-term problem, which is the continued failure to keep the level of benefits in line with inflation.”
“The backlog for work capability assessments for universal credit is not published, so we do not know the size of it, but we know that there is one. In April, as we all know, inflation-linked benefits were increased by 3.1% in line with the increase in the consumer prices index last September. When the uprating took effect, however, inflation was already over 7% and, as we have been reminded, it is now expected to rise to 11% this year. The Secretary of State previously told the Work and Pensions Committee that she does not favour one-off payments of the kind that the Chancellor announced in May. She is right: welcome though the Chancellor’s announcements are, I agree that it would be far better to have an uprating system that works properly, rather than having to resort to these stopgap measures to deal with the emergency.”
“We have just debated kinship carers. Only 59% of the 1 million people who claim carer’s allowance also claim means-tested benefits, so the other 41% will not get any additional support through the package. I applaud the Welsh Government’s initiative to provide an additional £500 payment for carers in Wales, and I think consideration should be given to comparable additional support elsewhere in the UK. People waiting to be assessed for a personal independence payment cannot access the £150 payment. People wait on average five months to be assessed and receive a decision, and some 300,000 people are waiting at the moment. We might think that they ought to be getting some help, but they will not. People waiting for a work capability assessment will not get the payment either.”
“The Treasury says that households with incomes among the lowest 10% of all households in England will gain just under £1,200 a year on average as a result of the package, while those among the top 10% will gain around £700 a year on average—significantly less. That strikes me as a broadly appropriate distributional impact. There are some caveats—for example, the payments are per household. As Save the Children and others have pointed out, larger families will not get any more support than smaller ones, even though children in larger families are at much greater risk of being in poverty. Nearly half—47%—of all UK children in a family with three or more children were in poverty in 2020, so that has a big impact. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation made the point that: “One key group who has lost out are unpaid carers”.”
“That will cover the period from October this year to March next year. The household support fund was originally announced in September 2021 with £500 million for local authorities for the six months from October 2021 to March 2022. It was extended with another £500 million for the following six months from April to September this year. I will say more about that later as a relatively new feature of the estimates. It is worth pausing to reflect on the fact that, although the Chancellor’s announcements are welcome, there are still some concerns. The Resolution Foundation estimates that the “measures announced this year to support households will in effect offset 82 per cent of the rise in households’ energy costs in 2022-23, rising to over 90 per cent for poorer households.” It is a substantial response to a substantial problem.”
“I particularly welcome the fact that, as the Secretary of State confirmed to me in the debate on the recent legislation to enable the payments, they will not be constrained by the benefit cap. The other measures that the Chancellor announced in May, which are not legislated for by the Social Security (Additional Payments) Act 2022, include two extensions of existing programmes for which DWP is responsible. First, pensioner households will receive a one-off £300 pensioner cost of living payment as a top-up to their winter fuel payment, which will cost in total £2.5 billion. Secondly, there will be an additional £500 million for the household support fund for local authorities to make discretionary payments to people in need—some £421 million for England and £79 million for the devolved Administrations through the Barnett formula.”
“Two of the support measures that he announced are funded by the DWP and are therefore a focus of this debate: first, the £650 payment for households receiving means-tested benefits, and secondly, the £150 payment for people receiving disability benefits. I understand that the DWP will pay the first £326 instalment of the £650 payment in the second half of this month. The qualifying day for that—the day on which someone had to have been claiming means-tested benefits—was 25 May. The qualifying day for the second instalment has not yet been announced, but I gather that it will be no later than 31 October. Those payments will be tax free and will not affect other benefit awards.”
“I am grateful that we have been granted this debate to discuss the spending of the Department for Work and Pensions. We are all familiar with the facts of the cost of living crisis: price rises are accelerating and inflation in May was the highest since 1982—the highest for 40 years—at 9.1%. In France, inflation was 5.8% and in the eurozone, it was 8.1% on average, so we have a particularly acute problem in the UK. The Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee said last month that it expects inflation to rise to slightly above 11% in October. In the light of those rapidly increasing costs, the Chancellor announced measures to support households in February, March and May. I warmly welcome that support, which is valued at £37 billion.”
“I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the commitment to uprating in line with inflation, but does he accept my earlier point about the need, in this very inflationary environment, to uprate the level of the benefit cap? Is he able to tell us whether it will be reviewed between now and next April?”
“Question deferred until tomorrow at Seven o’clock (Standing Order No. 54) . Office of the Secretary of State for Wales”
“I am grateful to everybody who has spoken today, including my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) on the Front Bench and the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman), who spoke for the SNP. I think the Minister said, in answer to my intervention, that the Government were not required to review the benefit cap until 2027 because the five-year clock had gone back to square one. I do not think it was reviewed in the last Parliament and I have no information about it being reviewed in the Parliament before that, but whatever the statutory obligation, surely when inflation is 10%-plus the Government need to recognise that families on the benefit cap—there are now more than 100,000 of them—are facing rising prices like everybody else and that the benefit cap must be raised in time for next April.”
“Member for his suggestion. I hope that we can take that up. My hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) made some important points, and I thank her for her work on the Select Committee as well, not least her dogged advocacy for vulnerable claimants of disability benefits. We have heard far too many reports of tragic disasters and errors on the part of the DWP, and we are not yet convinced that those problems have been entirely overcome. She gave us some sobering figures on the extent to which social security has been cut over the last 12 years, and we need to do much better. The hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) was right to draw our attention to the position of carers and the need for us to do better on supporting them, as we are now doing in Wales and Scotland.”
“I am grateful that we have been able to discuss these important issues, and I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the debate. I commend the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) for his long-standing campaign on bereavement benefits, and I hope we are reaching a successful conclusion on that. I am grateful to him for all his work on the Select Committee as well. He made an important point in his speech, which I had not thought of before: now that we have a new Government system for paying one-off grants, surely we could use it to make starter payments for universal credit, as the Select Committee recommended in its report on the five-week wait. As things stand, universal credit is not fit for purpose because of that five-week wait for the first regular benefit payment, and I am grateful to the hon.”
“I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) for the very sensitive way she opened the debate. I also commend the powerful speeches we have heard so far. I oppose the view expressed in the petition, essentially for the following reason: if we were to legalise assisted dying, we would impose an awful moral dilemma on every conscientious frail person nearing the end of their life. We have probably all known a number of such people. They have a lot of anxieties at that stage of their life. They worry very much about being a burden on their children, needing care from them and consuming resources that their children would otherwise inherit. If ending their life early were legally permissible, many who do not want to end their life would feel under great, probably irresistible, pressure to do so.”
“I accept wholly the point my right hon. Friend makes. I think a lot of the people I am concerned about, and expressing a worry about, are deeply loved by their children but do not want to put an undue burden on them. I am not saying that those children want to hasten their death or anything like that. I do not think that is often the case, although occasionally it might be. I do think that conscientious and frail elderly people will feel that they ought to avoid being a burden, and they will feel a pressure to end their lives prematurely as a result. I would say that we ought not to impose such a burden on vulnerable people nearing the end of their lives. The penalty that would come from doing so would be significantly greater than the considerable benefits we have heard set out in the debate.”
“Disabled people’s organisations have been very clear—in the interests of all the people they represent, and certainly not on any religious grounds—that legalising assisted dying would be a deeply damaging change. I think they are right.”
“I will make a bit more progress. In setting out this view, I am mindful of the stern instruction we all received last week from the National Secular Society, which wrote: “Dire warnings about the coercion of disabled, elderly, sick or the depressed can mask true motivations for opposing a change in the law…disguising religion objections as secular concerns, rather than seeking ways to mitigate potential risks of legalising assisted dying, opponents can exaggerate the risks, weaponising them to spread fear.” The National Secular Society will probably regard me as one of the guilty parties here, but I do not think the concerns I am expressing are apparent only to religious people.”
“I agree with the organisation Care Not Killing that we want “a funded policy for comprehensive hospice, community and hospital specialist palliative care services across the country with a duty placed on NHS trusts to ensure these services are made available to all who need them.” I visited my local children’s hospice on Saturday—we have heard from a number of Members who have made such visits—and it had a fête to raise funds, because it is struggling for cash. In my view, it should not have to do that. “In Place of Fear” was how Nye Bevan summed up what had been achieved in founding the NHS. Let us not give up now and decide that we can no longer afford the relief from fear that he rightly promised.”
“The fact that it is not being adequately funded at the moment must not become an excuse for giving up and accepting that painful deaths are unavoidable. Instead, as all right hon. and hon. Members have agreed so far in the debate, we need to invest in palliative care, where there have been big advances and where there could be many more, and to ensure that adequate care is provided to everybody who needs it.”
“I have not seen the polls that the right hon. Member refers to, but I think it is the case that all the major organisations representing disabled people in the UK oppose this change in the interests of their members. There are good and compassionate arguments—we have heard a number of them—in favour of the change that the petition calls for. I do not agree with those arguments, but let us be clear that they are not the only arguments for the change. In some minds, they are clearly not the decisive arguments either. As we have been told, in some countries where the change has been made, it is explicitly about saving the health service money. My party introduced the national health service, which is our proudest achievement. It needs to be adequately funded.”
“I cannot give way again. We should renew our determination not to impose fear and an awful moral dilemma on frail and conscientious elderly people approaching the end of their lives, and insist on modern palliative care for those who need it and a properly funded health service that supports living.”
“I just want to check one point. At the moment, about 150,000 working-age people who receive universal credit have their benefits limited by the benefit cap. Am I right to say that these additional payments are not constrained at all by the level of the benefit cap?”
“However, we need to be clear: the reason the Bill is needed is that the system for social security uprating has failed. It is a long-standing system. There is nothing new about the way it is done, but the unforeseen burst in inflation means that it simply has not worked this year. On this occasion, the decision has been taken to replace adequate uprating with ad hoc payments from the Treasury, which will certainly help us through the next few months. We need now to rethink the uprating system to make sure that it does not let us down again.”
“In response, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said that, “the package provided much-needed support for households, which will protect many of them against rising costs over the coming year.” Citizens Advice welcomes the targeted support to low-income households and hoped that it would “start to reverse the worrying trends we have seen in our data, including record-breaking food bank referrals.” Unlike the previous announcements, this May package is properly targeted on low-income families, as it needed to be. The Resolution Foundation described it as offsetting “the poor targeting of previous announcements.” It also described it as “serious redistribution”. It is, I think, a serious response to a serious problem. I also welcome the Chancellor’s change of heart over the windfall tax to fund some of the help that is needed.”
“I am very pleased that the Bill is in front of us. The Select Committee has been clear in the past few weeks that, without a big measure on this kind of scale, low-income families would be in very serious trouble indeed in the coming months. I echo the tribute that has just been paid by the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) to Jack Monroe and her campaigning on this. She gave very compelling evidence to the Select Committee at our meeting on 9 March. The package that has come forward has been widely welcomed. We put out a call for evidence on the cost of living in May.”
“My right hon. Friend makes a very important point. The Select Committee will certainly be looking at that. We are conducting an inquiry later this year on the question of the level of benefits, and the issue of how benefits should be uprated will certainly feature. I am intrigued to learn that the Secretary of State was able to do that in the 1970s given that we have been told that the IT systems in the 2020s cannot cope with it. I am certainly interested in seeing more on that.”
“It is simply not tenable for the Department to continue to operate antiquated systems that prevent Ministers from making timely changes to the rates at which legacy benefits are paid. We recommend that the Department work to increase the speed with which changes can be made to legacy benefit rates.” In its response in September that year, the Department said that it “recognises the need to be able to respond to events flexibly which is why we are investing in Universal Credit which is more agile than the systems that support legacy benefits.” While substantial numbers of people depend on legacy benefits, the Government surely need to keep the systems that support those benefits fit for purpose. They are clearly not fit for purpose at the moment, and that ought to be addressed.”
“I know that the Department has certainly commissioned such front ends for the legacy systems over a long time, so I am interested to know why, notwithstanding what that brandished document said, it is apparently still the case that uprating takes four or five months. Are front ends in place? Why have they apparently not made faster changes possible? In our June 2020 report on the Department’s response to coronavirus, the Select Committee recommended an increase in the speed with which changes could be made to legacy benefits. We said: “People will be claiming legacy benefits until at least September 2024, the Government’s most recent estimate for completing the rollout of Universal Credit.”
“The Chancellor told us that that was why he was unwilling simply to uprate benefits: it could have been done quickly for universal credit, as we discovered in the pandemic, but not for legacy benefits. In an earlier debate, I recall the shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth) brandishing a document from an IT company, perhaps Oracle, about the front end that it had built for the Department’s legacy systems, which it said enabled changes to be made to them more quickly. I wonder whether the Minister, in closing, could tell us the truth behind that claim about the front end that had been provided.”
“She noted: “There are some challenges about fraud” and that there would be difficulties if people claiming tax credits received a one-off payment and then moved to universal credit shortly afterwards. On the question of what might work best for claimants, she told us: “Previous experience would be that a steady sum of money would probably be more beneficial to claimants and customers, to help with that budgeting process.” I think she is right; it is not ideal for the Treasury to provide lump sums instead. Why was proper uprating not done in this case? The Chancellor pointed out that legacy benefits cannot be quickly uprated because they are run on antiquated IT systems, as the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) referred to, so uprating takes several months.”
“That would help—just modernising the old systems would help, and I will say something about that in a moment. We are getting ad hoc payments from the Treasury to tide us over. The Secretary of State rightly spelled out to the Committee the downsides of one-off ad hoc payments such as those that the Bill enables. In oral evidence in February last year, she told the Committee that there were higher risks of fraud attached to one-off payments and that they can make it difficult for claimants to budget effectively—both quite telling points. She said that one-off payments were not “one of the Department’s preferred approaches” for providing that financial support.”
“However, not all price-related elements of the system are included in the annual uprating exercise and the benefit cap means a substantial minority of claimants—an estimated 150,000—will see no increase at all and face another real terms cut to their benefits.” At a time when inflation is so high, surely at least the level of the benefit cap must be reviewed. Will the Minister give us any encouragement that it will be, ahead of April next year? For now, and in the context of the Bill, it is welcome, and quite a significant precedent, that the benefit cap will not apply to these additional payments.”
“One great advantage of the Chancellor’s package for low-income families, compared with a straightforward benefit uprating—I was grateful to the Secretary of State for confirming this—is that the benefit cap does not apply. It is striking that when it appears that the headline rate of social security benefits is likely to be raised by perhaps 10-plus per cent. next year, there is no indication at all about the benefit cap being lifted at all. That means that the growing number of families whose benefit has been capped will receive no increase in their income at all at a time when inflation is likely to be over 10%. In evidence to the Select Committee, the Child Poverty Action Group Told us that “the Government has made a welcome commitment to increase benefits in April 2023 in line with prices.”
“Overall, the package is somewhat more generous than early benefit uprating would have been, but it is less generous for larger families. The justification for that is not clear. The North East Child Poverty Committee told us that “a flat-rate £650 payment for all households on means-tested benefits, regardless of household size, additionally fails to recognise the clear link between family size and essential outgoings, with many larger families (already at much greater risk of poverty, a situation compounded by the two-child limit) facing intolerable financial pressures as a result of rising household bills.” I will make one final point.”
“Citizens Advice called for a more sustainable, responsive uprating approach, which means “addressing the lag between benefit uprating decision-making and implementation and the exclusion of the benefit cap from wider uprating.” It says that while the one-off payments to be made under the Bill “are more generous…for some households than if uprating had been brought forward”, there are problems. For example, as we were reminded by my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State, the one-off payments are the same amount regardless of family size. They also have cut-off dates, which risks arbitrarily excluding people from support. Flat-rate payments being irrespective of family size appears to be pretty unfair to larger families.”
“In response to our call for evidence on the cost of living, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation called on the Government to “commit to a much shorter timeframe for annual uprating between measuring inflation and uprating accordingly, to ensure benefit uprating genuinely reflects inflation for the year in question.” Lloyds Bank Foundation told us that the Government should “consider uprating benefits in line with inflation in the autumn to ensure they more accurately reflect the true cost of living.” That sounds like what was done in the 1970s. The Legatum Institute also suggested reducing the delay between CPI measurement and the application of uprating as well as introducing a mid-year uprating review.”
“It certainly does need to be done. I am pleased to tell the hon. Lady that on Monday the Select Committee will visit Social Security Scotland and that our vice-chair, the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills), who is in his place, will be part of that group. We look forward to that visit. The reason why benefit uprating has not worked this year is, of course, the six-month gap between September, when the inflation figure forms the basis of uprating for the following year, and April, when increases take effect.”
“I want to go back to what the Minister said about the benefit cap, and I welcome the point he made. Does he recognise that, in a very high inflation environment, there really is quite a compelling case for looking again at the level of the benefit cap for next year alongside the other benefit uprating matters?”
“It is, I think, clear that, as anticipated, we are starting to see an economic penalty from the new barriers to our trade with the European Union. Does the Minister agree that we need to work hard to improve relations with the EU with a view to reducing some of the barriers that are causing problems for us?”
“Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I welcome the efforts on pension credit take-up. The Chancellor’s additional payments are very welcome, but the need for them highlights the failings of the current pensions and benefits uprating system. The Select Committee will be looking at this, but does the Minister agree that now is the time to review how we uprate pensions and benefits each year and the level at which they are set?”
“The household support fund now accounts for billions in public spending. What information is the Department collecting about how that fund is being used, who is benefiting from it, what their circumstances are and how much support they receive? What plans does the Department have to publish that information?”
“It has been reported that this concession will deliver an additional subsidy of £200 million to Shell for its development of the Jackdaw field, which was going to go ahead anyway. How can that be justified?”
“British citizens’ relatives who are trapped in Afghanistan cannot apply for visas to come to the UK because no biometric service is available, and they have to have biometrics in order to apply for visas. For this reason, the requirement for biometrics has been suspended in the case of Ukraine, so will the Minister suspend it in the case of Afghanistan?”