Welfare Reform Bill
4:00 pm
Fiona Weir: It is difficult to put a figure on the age, because if you look at the controls that are already in place, we are receiving calls all the time from families with children over the age of 12. That is because 59 per cent. of local authorities’ child care sufficiency assessments show that there is nothing there for children over the age of 12. Often, a difficult teenager is harder to deal with than younger children. A lot of them will have particular needs and parents will not want to leave them unsupervised over the summer holiday. Very different sets of considerations apply at different ages, and people’s children and their family circumstances are all different. Some families are very strongly affected by domestic violence, or the conflict that has been going on within the family. Really, you are in the realm of sensitive judgment calls and therefore you have to decide who is best placed to make those calls.
The key emphasis that we are trying to get in this Bill is a move away from the constant pressure of sanctions, the threat of sanctions, and compulsion. Instead, we are saying, “Please build into it elements that are much more about encouraging people”. For example, there are provisions to pay employment and support allowance claimants an extra premium for undertaking work-related activity, but why could not those provisions apply to single parents? Instead, we have an entirely unjust comparator, whereby single parents face the threat of sanctions, even though another claimant group has an incentive built in.
Similarly, a lot of the issues that we are raising are about simple measures that would make it easier for people to take shorter term jobs—for under 16 hours a week—by increasing the earnings disregard. Again, this approach builds on opportunities for support and incentives to take a different route, rather than an approach that is very much about telling people, without knowledge of their personal circumstances, what works best for them.