Results 1-20 of 1,803 for speaker:Lord Freud
- Upcoming Business – Lords: Grand Committee (10 June 2013)
Mesothelioma Bill [HL] - Committee stage (Day 2) – Lord Freud.
- Upcoming Business – Lords: Grand Committee (5 June 2013)
Mesothelioma Bill [HL] - Committee stage – Lord Freud.
- Upcoming Business – Lords: Main Chamber (20 May 2013)
Mesothelioma Bill [HL] - Second reading – Lord Freud.
- Written Answers — House of Lords: National Insurance (16 May 2013)
Lord Freud: The statistics we have on the number of NINo registrations to Romanian and Bulgarian nationals entering the UK are available at: http://statistics.dwp.gov.uk/asd/index.php?page=tabtool. Guidance for users is available at: http://research. dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd1/tabtools/guidance.pdf I understand that the support staff in the House of Lords Library are also able to assist the noble Lord in...
- Written Answers — House of Lords: Poverty (16 May 2013)
Lord Freud: The Government have no plans to introduce any alert mechanisms. Poverty data are produced each year in the Households Below Average Income series, and at a local level in England in the local child poverty proxy statistics for each local authority. Under the Child Poverty Act, local authorities are required to publish an assessment of the needs of children living in poverty in their areas,...
- Housing Benefit — Question (15 May 2013)
Lord Freud: My Lords, we have no plans to make changes to the removal of the spare room subsidy. As well as conducting a formal evaluation of the policy over a two-year period, we have started an outreach exercise with a number of local authorities to monitor implementation and ensure that sufficient support has been provided to local authorities and claimants.
- Housing Benefit — Question (15 May 2013)
Lord Freud: My Lords, the policy as it stands is designed, first, to save money. We are looking to save £500 million a year here, which is within the context of the overall saving of £2 billion that we are trying to make over two years. The bulk of the burden has been on the private rented sector, on the LHA basis, and that has gone through reasonably safely. We are monitoring this particular...
- Housing Benefit — Question (15 May 2013)
Lord Freud: My Lords, we are looking to protect people in difficult circumstances by looking to the local authorities to apply the discretionary housing payments, which have gone up enormously. Overall, they are running at £150 million this year, and at £360 million for the SRS. Our expectation is that these hard cases will be looked after locally.
- Housing Benefit — Question (15 May 2013)
Lord Freud: My Lords, we are looking for local authorities to deal with this matter with adults. We think that there is a difference between disabled children and disabled adults in that disabled children cannot know whether they pose a risk to themselves or to another child whereas adults and couples are able to exercise choice in how they run their lives.
- Housing Benefit — Question (15 May 2013)
Lord Freud: My Lords, there has been a substantial exercise by many local authorities and housing associations around the country to try to juggle people’s requirements. The figures on social-sector housing provision in England show that 31% of the housing has one bedroom, 34% has two bedrooms and the remaining 35% has three or more bedrooms. So there is provision. It is a question of getting...
- Housing Benefit — Question (15 May 2013)
Lord Freud: My Lords, clearly I am aware of the recent very sad case, and I wish to reiterate my condolences to the family. It is not appropriate for me to comment further on that because it is a matter for the relevant authorities to investigate.
- Housing Benefit — Question (15 May 2013)
Lord Freud: My Lords, the idea of providing discretionary housing payments is twofold. The first is to allow for the costs of making a change and a transition; and the other, in some cases, is to maintain the family in an appropriate home indefinitely. One of the most obvious examples of the latter is specially adapted homes where it does not make sense to move. So there should be a strategy of support...
- Queen’s Speech — Debate (4th Day) (14 May 2013)
Lord Freud: My Lords, it is a privilege to open this debate today, the fourth day of the debate on the gracious Speech. I am delighted to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley of Knighton, the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester to this debate. I am sure that the whole House looks forward to their maiden speeches today. I am also pleased to welcome my...
- Child Poverty — Question (14 May 2013)
Lord Freud: My Lords, the IFS report is an interesting addition to the work on tackling child poverty in the UK, but the Government do not believe that it is possible to predict poverty levels with any certainty so far away. Poverty figures rely on the performance of the economy, on people’s behaviours and on government policy. As the report acknowledges, these cannot be predicted effectively over...
- Child Poverty — Question (14 May 2013)
Lord Freud: My Lords, I have read the report with great interest and not relied on my officials. There are a lot of very valuable things in it. One of the most interesting things, as the noble Lord will be aware, is the uncertainty caused by the way in which absolute poverty is measured. The report says that because the rather unreliable RPI measure is used, the figure is 10 percentage points higher,...
- Child Poverty — Question (14 May 2013)
Lord Freud: My Lords, we are currently consulting on child poverty and we are committed to the Child Poverty Act and the targets in it, but we are looking at better measures for tackling it. The academic research tells us that the best predictors of poverty are worklessness in parents and low educational attainment, and that one of the most effective ways of getting out of poverty for those children is...
- Child Poverty — Question (14 May 2013)
Lord Freud: What is vital with child poverty is that we decide on how to tackle it. Under the last Government, we found that enormous amounts of money were spent on tackling it without hardly moving a figure. In the last few years of that Government, it hardly shifted. The noble Lord can look at the figures himself. We spend 3.6% of GDP on children and families; we are the second highest in the UNICEF...
- Child Poverty — Question (14 May 2013)
Lord Freud: Yes, my Lords, there is a lot of variation around the country on child poverty. Again, I go back to the UNICEF report, which came out recently and which I found fascinating. Finland, which spends only 2.5% of its GNP on children and families, comes out very near the top. One thing that is so special about Finland is the emphasis that it puts on early years education, which seems to have a big...
- Child Poverty — Question (14 May 2013)
Lord Freud: My Lords, I could not agree more. One of the most dismaying things that I have ever read is the 2007 UNICEF report that put us right at the bottom in terms of child well-being. The latest report from 2011 shows us crawling up four places, but we have a long way to go and we need to find the right ways in which to help children genuinely to get out of poverty.
- Child Poverty — Question (14 May 2013)
Lord Freud: My Lords, we are in the middle of a genuine consultation on how to tackle child poverty. Maintaining the income measure so that we know what is happening but getting at the measures that will make a real underlying difference to entrenched poverty is absolutely vital in that exercise.