Welfare Reform Bill
4:00 pm
Eddy Graham: The Child Poverty Action Group shares a lot of Gingerbread’s concerns. The first thing to talk about is the format of the Bill. We said that it was not so much skeletal as invertebrate, in that it grants an awful lot of powers, such as for the Secretary of State to abolish income support for any group of people if he considers it expedient or necessary. What is expedient might not be necessary or wise, and we are concerned about the Secretary of State taking a power to remove the entitlement of vulnerable people to claim income support before we know what system will replace it. The powers that are being granted and the lack of draft regulations, unlike with the previous Welfare Reform Bill, for which extensive draft regulations were published, cause some concern.
Much of the Bill is about increasing conditionality on claimants, lone parents, and sick and disabled people, yet there is nothing about benefit adequacy. We are primarily concerned with the eradication of child poverty, but simply increasing conditions on benefit claimants on its own will not meet the 2020 target. There is nothing in the Bill about increasing benefit adequacy so that claimants who are forced to claim benefits for long or short periods can live on a reasonable income. We are opposed to increasing conditions on people for an insufficient level of income.
On the extension of contracting out, although the Bill does not remove any benefit claimants’ rights to appeal, it does move them one step further away. It places more decisions and directions in the hands of contractors and will leave claimants with less to appeal or complain about. It is not clear from the Bill what claimants will do when they have disputes with contractors about the action plans that they are drawing up or directions that they do or do not want. The Bill retains the right for claimants to appeal against benefit sanctions, but a lot of decision making takes place before that. We are concerned that, in effect, there is an eradication of people’s right of appeal.