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Welfare Reform and Incapacity Benefit

Given that hundreds of thousands of people are being driven into real poverty by the failure of, and maladministration of, the tax credit system, it is very sad that the hon. Gentleman seeks to make a rather cheap party political point about what is a very small number of claims. This issue affects his constituents, as well as mine. Hundreds of thousands of incredibly vulnerable people are making claims, and he would not be taking this matter so lightly if he had sat in the same advice centre that I did a couple of weeks ago. I heard a string of people on very low incomes—£10,000 to £11,000—explain that they face frightening repayments of £5,000 or £6,000, often as a consequence of errors caused by people other than themselves. The second issue, which has not been discussed much today—it certainly was not discussed much by the Secretary of State, or by the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea, perhaps because of his party’s connection with this debacle—is the problem with the Child Support Agency. Since its introduction in 1993, its operation has been a disaster. Given that we have known that it was failing for a long time, and given that the Prime Minister acknowledged that it was a mess back in 1998, it is surely astonishing that nothing has been done to make the system work more effectively. As a result, billions of pounds in maintenance due to some of the poorest families in the country has not been paid, and an unbelievable backlog of a third of a million cases are sitting in the CSA. Indeed, 80,000 of them have been sitting there for more than two and a half years without being processed. That demonstrates not only that the CSA has been a failure since it was established, but that it continues to be so. It is managing to collect only £1.85 for every pound spent on administering the system. In countries such as Australia, the collection rate is approximately £8 for every pound spent. We Liberal Democrats were interested to hear the Prime Minister say last week that the CSA is not fit for purpose. We thought that out of that might come the serious prospect of radical reform, be it reform of the existing arrangements, or the transferring of the CSA’s responsibilities to the Inland Revenue—several Members from all parts of the House have suggested that—to enable the information that we currently collect on people’s incomes to be used more effectively, and to enable a much greater deduction from the earnings of those who are determined to evade their responsibilities. Journalists and others such as the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) left the House in a state of excitement that day, thinking that the Prime Minister had announced a policy on the CSA. However, when journalists phoned the Department for Work and Pensions and the No. 10 press office to check, they established that there was no such policy. It seems as if the Prime Minister was making up policy on the hoof in this area, as he seems to have done since 1998. That is why it is particularly important that there be an early opportunity for the Secretary of State to introduce proposals that tackle these problems, which have existed for many years, in a fundamental way, rather than simply seeking to gloss over them.