Baroness Buscombe: We have had a number of workshops with stakeholders during which consent has been discussed, and we plan to do further work. This will include working with claimants and their representatives to ensure the process works effectively for vulnerable claimants to access the service.
Baroness Buscombe: The Department will be providing updated figures to those we published in June 2018. This will show the number of claimants affected by the policy to provide support for a maximum of two children as at April 2019. The full breakdown of the current statistics can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/child-tax-credit-an...
Baroness Buscombe: We committed to working with stakeholders to inform our approach to Work Capability Assessment (WCA) reform in the Improving Lives Command Paper published in 2017 and have been engaging on this broader issue through a number of forums. This has included our Policy Forum, a small group involving academics, think tanks and a number of disability charities. Specifically, on the single...
Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, as I have already said, Ministers are considering the judgment in detail and will make a decision about their response in due course. When designing universal credit, it was important to provide a simpler system, and a conscious choice was made not to replicate every aspect of disability provision in the legacy system, which contains seven different disability payments. These are...
Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, I make it clear that current severe disability premium claimants will receive transitional protection as part of the managed migration process. We now have transitional payments in place for severe disability premium claimants who have moved on to universal credit. As the noble Baroness well knows, we are now spending over £50 billion a year on benefits to support disabled people...
Baroness Buscombe: As the noble Baroness knows, the focus of this Urgent Question is the court case and severe disability payments. We put that block—if I can call it that—in place on 16 January, to stop those with a severe disability migrating, and to prevent any more people who are on severe disability premium naturally migrating to universal credit, because we recognise that there is an issue here....
Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, I am sticking to the Urgent Question—which is about the severe disability premium. However, the reality is that we are looking at that judgment and considering with care the way in which we support those who are transferring naturally to universal credit. It is important that we have the legislation in place as soon as possible, so that in future everybody is manage-migrated, as...
Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat in the form of a Statement the Answer given by my honourable friend the Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work to an Urgent Question in another place on the transfer of the severe disability premium to universal credit. The Statement is as follows: “Universal credit is the biggest change of the welfare system since it was...
Baroness Buscombe: Work on the evaluation of the lower benefit cap is ongoing. The impact evaluation uses a complex methodology that must first isolate the impacts of the lower cap from the original cap, and then analyse how these impacts differ across geographical regions and household types. It is important to ensure that the methodological approach is robust, and the Department has contracted the Institute...
Baroness Buscombe: I thank my noble friend for her point, which is so well made. One reason I am so pleased to have this debate is that it helps, in a sense, to put more pressure on those taking this forward to look a little harder and further at what more we can do to develop financial capability. Yes, as raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, there is always an issue with regard to squeezing this into the...
Baroness Buscombe: I thank the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York and the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, for giving me a further springboard to have discussions on this with my ministerial colleagues in the Department for Education. It is something that we worked on during the passage of the Bill. We did not get as far as we would have liked. We will try again, but we will also keep talking to the...
Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, I very much welcome this debate. It has been very good, albeit short, and has covered a number of important issues. It is really timely to reflect on where we have come since the passing of the Financial Guidance and Claims Act. My memory has constantly been nudged while listing to noble Lords about many of the things we debated, often at length, particularly regarding education. I...
Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, we are reforming the welfare system to better support the most vulnerable while encouraging more people into work, which is the most effective route out of poverty. We provide a strong safety net for those who need it and continue to spend over £95 billion a year on working-age benefits. We are introducing big changes and a further £4.5 billion boost following the Autumn Budget,...
Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, while we have always said that there are many reasons why people use food banks and that their growth cannot be linked to a single cause, we have long acknowledged that there were issues with the early rollout of UC. We have responded quickly to the feedback we have received and made numerous improvements to universal credit. We have removed waiting days and created advances of up...
Baroness Buscombe: I agree with the noble Baroness: everyone should have access to decent, healthy food. Tackling disadvantage will always be a priority for this Government. We welcome the new report from the Children’s Future Food Inquiry. Employment is at a record high and wages are outstripping inflation, but we know that there is more to do to ensure that everyone has access to nutritious, healthy food....
Baroness Buscombe: I think it is fair to say that I answered that question to some degree in a previous answer. We are working hard with schools and injecting significant funds to ensure that children are properly fed, if not at home then by breakfast clubs, and through the school holidays. There is much more that we have been doing to ensure that families are not worse off; indeed, we have the most generous...
Baroness Buscombe: I can reassure my noble friend that one of the reasons we have been making so many iterative changes to universal credit is that we have been concerned about the delay in people receiving income quickly and fairly. I re-emphasise that we are still waiting for some of the benefits of that to filter through to the work on the ground and benefit people who need the support. Our department is...
Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016 provided for a four-year freeze, and this was supported by Members in both Houses. This freeze will lapse after 2019-20. The freeze was implemented at a time of great public debate about the fairness of benefits outstripping earnings growth. However, we are doing much more than that. Switching people on to universal credit is taking time because...
Baroness Buscombe: In their responses to the 2016 Improving Lives: Work, Health and Disability Green Paper consultation and through several other forums, stakeholders have raised concerns about the feeling of duplication across the current assessment processes. We have therefore been exploring options to reduce this, and make improvements to the customer experience. By testing the feasibility of a single...
