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 report presents the positive conclusion that there has been a 17% increase in the number of users saying that the jobcentre helped to motivate them in their job search since 2016. However, it also reports that of the young women using Jobcentre Plus over the last three years, 52% have ranked their experiences as humiliating and 65% as stressful and that 63% have felt ashamed to go to the jobcentre. It is clear from both pieces of research that the programme is not going well. I understand that one of the problems for the Department is that the universal credit IT system does not provide the basic information that would allow an assessment of how the programme is doing—information that was routinely provided under the older systems.”
“Managers in all the boroughs studied acknowledged that they do not monitor referrals and that there is no effective monitoring system in place, as the Minister’s difficulty in answering my parliamentary questions also illustrates. The policy, as I understand it, is that after six months on the programme, if young people do not have a job they should go on to a mandated apprenticeship or voluntary work experience. That is not happening in practice, according to the published research. In a small survey of voluntary sector service providers who work in youth employability and training, 79% were completely unaware of the youth obligation scheme, including a fair number of those who work with their local Jobcentre Plus on a weekly or monthly basis.”
“Only a third of young women and two fifths of men surveyed felt they were getting personalised support from their work coach. Some 21% of black, Asian and minority ethnic jobseekers said they were treated unfairly by Jobcentre Plus staff, compared with 15% of white jobseekers. One youth obligation manager described their package for young people as intense specialist support for six months, which I think is what Ministers intended. Another manager, however, explained that over the course of six months they “have two workshops where young people can learn how to write a good CV and meet providers”. That appeared to be it.”
“The second piece of research I want to draw on has been published today by the Young Women’s Trust. It is brand new and I appreciate that the Minister and his officials may well not yet have had a chance to consider it. However, it, too, is a useful and informative piece of work. The research surveyed over 700 young Jobcentre Plus users in the UK over three years. It conducted interviews with staff in 13 jobcentres across three London boroughs and conducted focus group interviews with 28 young people aged between 18 to 25 who were living across 10 different London boroughs. It concluded that the youth obligation is misunderstood by Jobcentre Plus staff and is patchy in its implementation. Young people’s employment outcomes are not recorded and there is little plan for support beyond six months.”
“In interviews, participants noted that they thought their work coach did not have time to discuss issues not directly related to looking for work. A significant group of participants held very negative views about Jobcentre Plus and expected to be treated poorly. This made them less likely to disclose issues that were hindering their ability to work, such as worsening mental health or addiction issues. It also resulted in some participants viewing reasonable advice from the Jobcentre very negatively. In both London and Manchester, the sanction rate for those on the youth obligation was higher than for the comparator group claiming benefits in a non-youth obligation area. Some 36% of London youth obligation participants were sanctioned at some point in the past year, compared with 24% in non-youth obligation areas.”
“In the experience of those who took part, there appeared to be little acknowledgement of whether the participant was ready to find work, or of the specific barriers that many participants faced or how to mitigate them. For example, one participant with low qualifications commented: “They just tell you how to make a CV. Then they tell you to make it a different way. Like every day, that’s all we did”. Most participants were happy with their work coach, but there did not seem to be much substantive personalisation. Participants rarely noted that they had been offered access to particular activities or services to meet their specific aspirations, or additional or specialised support to address their more complex needs. Despite the complex needs of quite a number of the participants, referrals outside Jobcentre Plus were rare.”
“Thirdly, 10% of London participants and 3% of Manchester participants left because they did not like the programme. That included two participants with learning difficulties who found the activities they were asked to engage in impossible without support, which they said they were not offered. Research found that the most positive aspect of the programme was the initial engagement, and nearly two thirds of participants thought that making an individual plan that identified their interests and the support they wanted was helpful. Beyond that the focus was on practical mechanisms for identifying and applying for jobs, such as how to write a CV and use websites.”
“Those interim findings concluded that only around half of those who started the youth obligation programme remained on it for the whole six-month period. That was not generally because the participants found work or entered training; instead, there were three key reasons for withdrawing from the programme. First, 45% of London participants and 40% of Manchester participants left the programme because of continuing, pre-existing difficulties in their lives, such as homelessness, drug or alcohol problems, or mental health issues. Secondly, 45% of London participants and 57% of Manchester participants left because they ran into a specific problem, and afterwards—through fear, embarrassment or uncertainty about their continued status on the programme—did not go back.”
“Although the Department is not able to say how the youth obligation is going, others have started to provide valuable information about the effectiveness of the programme. Their findings so far are not encouraging, and I want to quote this afternoon from two pieces of research. Centrepoint, drawing on funding from the Trust for London, commissioned the University of Warwick to evaluate the extent to which the youth obligation supports disadvantaged young people into employment, education or training. The researchers undertook longitudinal research in London and Manchester, including a survey of 80 youth obligation participants. Centrepoint has compiled interim findings, with a final report due to be published in the spring.”
“To answer this would require checking individual records at each Jobcentre, which would incur disproportionate cost.” I tabled more questions on 6 September, and on 11 September the Minister for Employment replied, more encouragingly: “The information requested is not currently readily available, however the Department does monitor requests we receive for new statistics and consider whether we can produce and release analysis that will helpfully inform public debate. The Department is therefore looking at this issue with a view to seeing what statistics could be produced on a regular basis.” I hope that the Minister will provide us with an update on the Department’s thinking on the matter.”
“It would be puzzling if Ministers really do not intend to gather, still less publish, evaluation data on the youth obligation. On 26 April, I asked how many of those supported through the youth obligation had gone on to various destinations. The Minister for Employment replied on 1 May in a written answer, stating: “It is not possible to say how many of them have subsequently gone on to (a) an apprenticeship (b) a traineeship and (c) a work placement without checking individual records, which would incur disproportionate cost.” I asked how many young people had stopped receiving benefits since beginning the youth obligation, and an answer from 1 May stated: “DWP does not hold this information as part of any centralised management information process.”
“It is now 10 years since I was a Minister in the Department, but I cannot believe that the Department has forgotten the importance it attached at that time to evidence about effectiveness. Indeed, if the Minister is doubtful about the value of such data, he should read some of the speeches that the current Secretary of State made about the Work programme when she was the Minister responsible for employment. The Work Programme, for all its many faults, generated a great deal of valuable, published performance data. I understand that Ministers intend to publish comparable data for the Work and Health programme in due course, in some detail and with reasonable regularity, although I also understand that publication of that data has been delayed.”
“The only information provided in answers to my questions so far was in those from April and May, when I was told that, from when the youth obligation started in April 2017 to this February, 24,600 people had started on the programme and 9,300 were still on it. Is the Minister able to provide the House today, after another six months, with an update on those figures? As far as I know, there are no figures in the public domain other than those in the answer I received at that time. The obvious and important question is: what has become of the 15,300 who started on the programme and then left it? I asked a series of questions about this—for example, how many of them had gone on to an apprenticeship—and in reply to each the Minister’s colleague said that he did not know and that it would be disproportionately expensive to find out.”
“There is also of course a disastrously large number of young people outside the system altogether—not in education, employment or training at all. The Government are therefore absolutely right to focus effort on young unemployed people. The question is whether the current programme is any good. From the answers given by the Minister’s colleague, the Minister for Employment, the Government appear not to know whether it is any good, and indeed they appear not to have very much interest in finding out. I therefore hope that the Minister will be able to dispel that impression when he responds to this debate.”
“According to this month’s labour market statistics, the unemployment rate among 16 to 24-year-olds is 10.8%, compared with an overall rate of 4% for those aged 16 and over. The unemployment rate among young people has consistently been two and a half to three times the overall rate for quite a long time. Of course the employment rate—the overall rate and the youth rate—is much lower than the peaks we saw five or six years ago, but the introduction of the youth obligation is an acknowledgement, rightly, that youth unemployment remains too high. More than one in 10 young people are out of work and looking for a job, when they ought to be building the skills to secure for themselves a lifetime of employment and in a position to contribute to the economy.”
“We introduced the new deal for young people, which was a radical departure in state labour market intervention, and it has profoundly influenced all the programmes since. By the way, as the youth obligation is the only current labour market programme for young people and is available only in areas where universal credit has been rolled out, there have been since April 2017—for the first time in two decades—parts of the country where there is no programme at all for young people. With universal credit being rolled out for new claims to every jobcentre by the end of the year, as I understand it, will the Minister confirm that we will again have a programme for young people in every part of the country by the end of the year? Young people are still at a distinct disadvantage in the labour market.”
“Over the course of the past year, I have tabled a number of parliamentary questions about the Government’s youth obligation support programme, which was introduced in April last year, and the answers to those questions have contained remarkably little information. I am delighted to see the Minister in his place, and I hope he will take this opportunity to provide the House with some more information to allow us to make at least an initial assessment of whether the programme is proving effective. At the very least, will he confirm to the House that such information will be forthcoming in the near future? Just over two decades ago, I became the Parliamentary Private Secretary to Andrew Smith, who was the first holder of the post of Minister for Employment after the 1997 general election.”
“I am grateful for the way the hon. Gentleman is answering my questions. Does he have any information about how many participants on the youth obligation programme had the opportunity of the sector-based work academy to which he refers?”
“Have the discussions with the Republic of Ireland Government about the possibility of our leaving with no deal next March identified that they would have a clear obligation, enforceable quite quickly through the European Court of Justice, to impose customs and other checks on trade across the border with Northern Ireland?”
“The Prime Minister has told us that parts of the political declaration on the future relationship have been agreed, including on services. What has been agreed on financial services?”
“The National Audit Office did not find the Department to be transparent when it was raising concerns about this; it found it to be defensive. Unfortunately, that has characterised the Department for a number of years around universal credit, as the NAO has pointed out in the past. With this much bigger transfer ahead, which the Minister mentioned, are there any proposals to change the culture of the Department and to be more open when problems of this kind are raised?”
“One of the representations the Secretary of State will have received is from the Residential Landlords Association saying that a majority of its members are now not willing to let accommodation to universal credit claimants because they quickly get into arrears and cannot pay the rent. Is she proposing some change to address that specific problem?”
“I spoke to a claimant on Merseyside at a time when the delay was even longer than it is now. She told me that the jobcentre had sent her away to live on water for six weeks. She reached the point at which she attempted to take her own life. Five weeks without support is not a realistic or acceptable feature of this benefit.”
“The right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel) is absolutely right to say that change is urgently needed, and I hope that her Front-Bench colleagues will have heard that. Of all the many flaws in universal credit, the worst is the five-week delay between claiming and being entitled to benefit. Ministers can justify this—the Secretary of State had a go at doing so again yesterday—only in the case of people who have just left a monthly paid job and therefore have a month’s salary in the bank. The reality is that a very large number of people do not have a month’s salary in the bank when they make a claim for universal credit. Many are paid weekly or on zero-hours contracts; for all sorts of reasons, many are simply not in the position to have that much money in the bank.”
“She was not told about the availability of an advance payment. They are now being better publicised than when she made her claim, but the problem with advance payments is that people are being plunged into debt right at the start of their claim. For many, it is impossible to get out of debt once the system has forced them on to that slope. The result is that they have to go to food banks. We know that food bank demand rockets when universal credit comes in, because people get behind with their rent and other debts mount. I say to Conservative Members—many of them are fully aware of this—that this is not the way to treat our fellow citizens. Universal credit must be changed to stop this happening.”
“The problems went right back to the start, when the July 2010 Green Paper stated: “The IT changes that would be necessary to deliver”— universal credit— “would not constitute a major IT project.” How wrong that was, sadly.”
“It is clear that we are heading into very difficult territory if this goes ahead on the current basis, as is still likely. The Conservative party has been warned about what happens to parties when they go ahead with such projects, given the prospects for universal credit. There is now, however, a chance—there is a moment here—for Ministers to fix these problems. They could take the necessary action; the Chancellor could do so in the Budget on Monday week. I urge them to stop the roll-out until these problems are fixed and not to press ahead in the way that is being proposed. Universal credit was a perfectly sensible idea. Unfortunately, its implementation has been very badly handled.”
“A lot of the submissions expressed deep foreboding about where we are heading with the managed migration programme. The Resolution Foundation made the following recommendation, which I commend to Ministers: “The managed migration should only begin when the DWP has shown service levels meet a standard agreed with external experts including SSAC”— the Social Security Advisory Committee— “and the Work and Pensions Committee. We suggest this should be that 90 per cent of new claims are paid in full and on time”. The recommendation—an excellent one—is that managed migration should not commence until that level of service can be achieved, and I hope that the Minister will be able to respond to that when he winds up. I commend that idea to him.”
“He said: “It is a social experiment that’s gone wrong”. Of the Department for Work and Pensions, he said: “They remain in denial about the system”. His concluding point was that “it doesn’t make business sense to let a property to a tenant who has no idea of when their claim is going to be processed or how much money they are going to get, and who will invariably end up in arrears”. That is the reality of the experience of private landlords, let alone the organisations representing claimants that have been making submissions to the Government. Among the many representations that the Government have received about managed migration, they will have seen the report prepared by the Resolution Foundation, and I hope that they have looked at it carefully.”
“The hon. Lady makes an interesting suggestion, and I hope that her Front-Bench colleagues will listen to it. We certainly need urgent change on this point. Ministers have, perhaps understandably, developed a tin ear to the voices that they should have been listening to over the past eight years, as the warnings about what they were getting into were being sounded. They have not been listening to those warnings, but I hope that they are at least listening to the Residential Landlords Association. They might have heard Paul Cunningham, the chair of Great Yarmouth Landlords Association, on the radio last week, as I did. He said that the majority of landlords in Great Yarmouth were now unwilling to let property to universal credit claimants because they inevitably got into arrears with their rent.”
“I welcome the reports of imminent reform. Ministers can justify the five-week delay in universal credit only in cases where people have just left a monthly paid job. Yesterday, he told the House: “The five-week wait has no savings implications for the Exchequer.” —[ Official Report , 15 October 2018; Vol. 647, c. 395.] Will he therefore now scrap it?”
“T8. Ministers defend the five-week wait for universal credit on the basis that employees will have had a month’s pay in their bank account when they left their previous job. Does the Minister accept that that case simply does not apply to employees paid weekly or those on zero-hours contracts?”
“Some people in the House who have been supporting the Government seem to think that the solution is to have a hard border in Northern Ireland but not to enforce it. Is not that prospect just a myth?”
“When the Select Committee met Michel Barnier on 3 September, he set out four reasons why the EU could not accept the proposal on the facilitated customs arrangement and the common rulebook for goods. The Select Committee then published its evidence. Why, therefore, did the Prime Minister apparently not know when she went to Salzburg on 19 September that those key elements in her Chequers proposals had already been rejected by EU member states? It has been said that she was insulted, but she should have known that that was their position.”
“It occurred to me that another way of achieving the same result might be to widen the definition of “offensive weapon” to include corrosive substances, because the wording in the existing prohibitions is about offensive weapons. If one said that corrosive substances are offensive weapons, that might have the same effect as proposed new clauses 3 and 4. I would be interested to know whether that was considered. This is an offensive weapons Bill—it does not say anywhere that corrosive substances and corrosive products are offensive weapons and I appreciate that there might be technical difficulties in doing so. In the absence of that, the two new clauses would deal with the gap. I hope the Minister feels able to commend them.”
“New clause 4 would extend to corrosive substances the prohibition on threatening people with knives that already applies in schools. It has been an offence in schools since 2012, since the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act. Again, the Bill is extending the existing prohibition on knives from schools to further education premises, which is the right thing to do. New clause 4 applies the same prohibition to corrosive substances. I suggest that neither of the proposed new clauses is contentious—none of us wants people to have corrosive substances or threaten other people with them in schools or further education colleges. The new clauses extend to acid existing measures that cover knives and I hope the Minister agrees to them.”
“Proposed new clause 3 makes it an offence to possess a corrosive substance on educational premises. It has long been an offence to have a knife in school. Clause 21 relates to section 139(a) of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 and rightly extends the current ban on possession of knives in schools to cover further education colleges as well. The ban in schools was introduced in the Offensive Weapons Act 1996 when Michael Howard was Home Secretary—that is the second occasion I have had to refer to something he has done. The same ban should cover corrosive substances. It is a lengthy new clause, but with a straightforward effect. I hope that the Minister will recognise the validity of the attempt and be able to accept it, or something very like it.”
“Thank you, Mr Gray, and I bid you a warm welcome back to the Chair of our Committee. One of the welcome contributions in the Bill is bringing the law on acid and corrosive substances into line with the law on knives, so that possession without good reason is an offence. There is evidence that, in some cases, criminal gang members have switched from knives to acid because, since possession of acid has not been an offence, it has been less risky for them to carry it than to carry a knife. In my view, the Bill is absolutely right to bring the law on acid into line with the law on knives. However, there are two respects in which, if the Bill is not amended, the law on acid will still be less demanding than it is on knives. I think they should be aligned throughout, which is what new clauses 3 and 4 are designed to achieve.”
“(3) Omit subsection (3).”— (Karin Smyth.) This new clause would amend the Firearms Act 1968 to prevent a person under the age of 18 from having an air gun on private land other than as part of a sporting club. Brought up, and read the First time.”
“The argument for new clause 3 is that possessing acid in schools ought to be an offence as well, because how can a school or further education college show that a student with acid intends to injure somebody with that acid? That is exactly the difficulty that the police have always had. Nevertheless, the Minister has said that she will give the matter further consideration and come back to us on Report. On that basis, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion. Clause, by leave, withdrawn. New Clause 7 Prohibition of air weapons on private land for those under the age of 18 “(1) Section 23 of the Firearms Act 1968 is amended in accordance with subsections (2) to (3). (2) Omit subsection (1).”
“I am grateful to the Minister for agreeing to consider further the content of new clause 3 with, I presume, a view to come back to it on Report. I thought the argument that she used at the beginning of her remarks was a bit disappointing. She seemed to say, “Well, there aren’t that many acid attacks, therefore we don’t need to legislate on it.” Thankfully that view, which has long been held by Government, has changed, and I very much welcome the fact that the Bill makes the possession of acid an offence without a requirement for evidence that somebody intends to injure somebody with it. That has always been the difficulty: simply possessing acid has not, up until now, been an offence. Thankfully it is made an offence by the Bill, and I welcome that.”
“It would also mean that when substances are purchased, the purchaser will be traceable. That in itself will cause some potential perpetrators to pause before going ahead, making their purchase and then going on to inflict dreadful injuries on somebody.”
“New clause 10 goes a step further, making it a requirement that corrosive substances should not be paid for by cash. They would need to be bought either by cheque or by credit or debit card. There are two reasons for taking this step. First, it would end what we have seen too often, which is somebody on the spur of the moment buying a corrosive substance extremely cheaply by cash and therefore completely anonymously, quite likely with no prior intention of doing so. Something gets into their head, they decide to go along and buy this stuff and then go on to cause enormous harm to somebody by throwing it over them. Introducing the requirement for a bit of a pause before making the purchase and having to use a debit or credit card might stop some people taking that spur-of-the-moment step and regretting it for the rest of their lives.”
“I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time. I will speak briefly to new clause 10. I am worried that it is extremely easy to buy acid and other corrosive substances. They are often very cheap and they can readily be purchased in DIY shops. Recently, one of my constituents brought to me a product that was essentially sulphuric acid, which he had bought extremely cheaply in a pound shop down the road. I welcome the fact that the Bill will make it a bit harder to obtain such substances by banning their sale to under-18s, as well as the step already taken in April to promote sulphuric acid from the lower to the higher category in the explosive precursors regulations, meaning that, since April, the purchaser requires a licence.”
“I am grateful to the Minister for her explanation, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn for the telling points she made. Her point about contactless payment is absolutely right and needs to be considered. The Government could take one step here to force people to pause and think a little before making a spur of the moment purchase of one of these substances and going on to inflict appalling injuries on someone else—and, as I said, for the perpetrator probably to regret having done so for the rest of their life. I am glad that the Government are legislating on corrosive substances, and this is a serious issue that we need to get to grips with now before it becomes even worse in the future, so I want to press new clause 10 to a vote. Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill.”
“It would be an offence, as in my view it certainly should be, to carry acid around in, for example, a Lucozade bottle, which, as we have heard, has happened too often over the last year or two. On its own, new clause 11 will not solve our problem, but I think it could help. It will constrain a little the ready and cheap access to liquid capable of inflicting appalling injuries, which is part of the backdrop for the rapid growth in this crime over the past five years.”
“Given what has happened to him and his future prospects, he talked a great deal of sense during the interview published in The Sun , and he made the point that “one bit of legislation which I’d really love to see be pushed through is a decanting legislation; to make it an offence to decant acid from its original, well-labelled bottle, into any other receptacle.” In his case, the acid was held in a beaker by the person who knocked on his front door and then just thrown over him. New clause 11 is another measure that aims to make it a bit harder to use acid to commit a crime. New clause 11 says that a container in a public place holding acid in circumstances in which it is in the public place for good reason must be clearly marked or labelled as containing a corrosive substance.”
“I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time. On 8 January 2018, The Sun reported the case of 32-year old Andreas Christopheros. He was the victim of an acid attack on his doorstep in 2014. He lost 90% of his face and will need 10 years of facial reconstructive surgery. He lost the sight of one eye, and is in danger of losing it in the other in due course. As it turned out, it was a case of mistaken identity. The perpetrator wanted revenge on somebody for an alleged assault on a relative but knocked on the wrong door. Mr Christopheros had no connection at all with the incident for which revenge was being sought, but he has a lifetime of problems ahead as a result of the injuries inflicted on him.”
“If it is on the streets, it should be clearly marked as a corrosive substance dangerous to life and limb and liable to cause injury. It should therefore be a requirement that the containers in which it is being carried are properly marked accordingly. I do not think the Minister has set out—”
“I am not convinced. The problem is that the Minister is again going back to the argument about the 1953 Act and the fact that if someone intends to cause injury, it has always been an offence to carry acid. That is true, but if we accept that argument—if the Minister accepts it—we would not have measures in the Bill making possession of acid an offence. I am glad that she has got over the previous argument for not doing that and that the Bill now makes the possession of acid an offence. I am concerned about the sort of situation where somebody is lawfully carrying acid, because they have a legitimate purpose to use it, and then, for whatever reason, the container falls into the wrong hands. I think we should be very cautious about this stuff.”