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Tax Credits Up-rating Regulations 201

My Lords, in the context of the overall fiscal position in which we find ourselves, it is not surprising that we are having to make some pretty unpalatable changes to some tax credits. As the Minister has said, expenditure on tax credits rose in cash terms by two-thirds over the seven years from 2003. In the current environment, that is simply unsustainable. Although there are some aspects of the changes that we find quite difficult—for example, reducing the proportion of reclaimable childcare is not something that we would have done willingly—other elements are long overdue. It is crazy that people earning £50,000 or £60,000 or even £70,000 have been able to claim an element of child tax credit. Of course, the concept that parents find themselves in financial stress when they have young children is not new; it is dealt with at great length in Malthus’s great essay on population, where he talks about how poverty comes to young families at the point when they have children. However, that was talking about an era in which most people were poor for the whole of their lives. That simply does not exist today. A circumstance in which nine out of 10 families were eligible for tax credit does not really have any sense. Even with the changes, some seven families out of 10 will continue to get tax credits. That certainly encompasses all those who could even vaguely be said to be in need. The situation we now find ourselves in at this end of the income scale was exemplified to me by a colleague in another place yesterday, who was telling me that she had had a letter from a constituent grumbling that the changes to tax credits and child benefit meant that she and her family would no longer be able to have their second foreign holiday that year, and asking what the MP was going to do about it. I suspect she got a fairly shirty response, but many people at upper income levels have been regarding tax credits and child benefit as not necessary for the ordinary running of the family but for luxuries, so to see that curtailed in the overall scheme is very welcome. Slightly down the track comes the really welcome introduction of the universal credit. Just as, at the top end, people are getting some benefits who, frankly, do not need them for the good functioning of their families, at the bottom end there are still huge disincentives around work and huge anger among people who are trying to make a living and do the right thing. At the recent Lib Dem conference in Sheffield I went to get my papers from a kiosk in the shopping centre in the centre of Sheffield, and the young woman behind the kiosk asked rather aggressively what I was doing there. I said very timorously that I was at the Lib Dem conference. She said she was a Labour voter. I was prepared for a tirade about how flinty hearted we were and I got a tirade, but the tirade I got related to the fact that because she was a single mum with two young children she could only work part-time and earn only £6,000 a year and her sister, who was 28 and had never done a day’s work in her life, was getting more from the state. At this point her colleague in the kiosk joined in. They were so intent on telling me about this injustice in the system that everybody else who was trying just to buy a paper had to come up in a very shamefaced way so as not to interrupt this flow of invective, which was being directed at politicians generally. I was able to tell her that the universal benefit was on its way and thereafter life would look somewhat fairer from her perspective. I have two questions for the Minister around these proposals today. The first relates to what he said about Sure Start. There has been an awful lot of noise about Sure Start. He said that the Government are protecting the cash funding for Sure Start. I know that every Liberal Democrat council is able to maintain Sure Start and I know some councils cannot. Can the Minister tell me why, if the Government are protecting the cash funding for Sure Start, some councils might be choosing to cut it? Secondly, the whole area of child poverty is to be the subject, I believe, of a child poverty strategy document due for publication shortly. Under the terms of the Child Poverty Act it is due to be produced by the end of March. It is now almost the end of March and I would like the Minister’s assurance that that document will, indeed, be winging its way to us over the next few days.