Welfare Reform Bill

I certainly welcome and support the Bill, which is timely and contains a wide variety of important measures to improve the welfare system. I am quite familiar with many of them, for reasons that my right hon. Friend the Minister will know. I want to confine my remarks to the sections of the Bill that deal with reforms of the social fund. I welcome the proposal in the Bill so far as it goes, namely to forge something of an alliance between the budgeting loan part of the social fund and credit unions. But I want to suggest that the social fund needs a much more radical reform than that. Over the last few years, we have made some useful, but I think rather minor, improvements to the social fund. If that sounds like a criticism from an ex-Minister, let me say that the criticism is aimed at myself. I feel that I did not make as much progress in reforming the social fund as I wanted while it was my responsibility. I take on that criticism personally. But I hope that now it has been included in the Bill—I am pleased that it has—the Government will consider going further. We know the problems with the social fund. They are now widely known. Citizens advice bureaux constantly remind us that the social fund suffers from underfunding and that there is an element of a postcode lottery, and even a calendar lottery. I would certainly confirm all those criticisms. As a Minister, I often found that, part of the way through the financial year, details of the allocations of the social fund in different regions would come back on to my desk for me to alter to make sure that the target was met by the end of the year because some areas were spending above trajectory and some below. We had to keep shuffling the figures around, which was crazy. It meant that there was no predictability in certain areas as to how the social fund was going. The social fund is also not used properly by some of the claimants. It is an unfortunate fact that some tend to use the opportunity to access budget loans as a kind of revolving door and keep coming back for more loans, whereas others desperately need a budgeting loan and simply cannot get it. The Treasury Committee and the Work and Pensions Committees have urged us to do more and we should take this opportunity to heed what they are saying. The problem with the social fund is that it is wholly passive; it does not give us any of the additional engagement with clients that we need if this is to be part of an active welfare state, as we would want it to be. I welcome the tie-up with the credit unions. The credit union movement is growing thanks to investment from the Government through the growth fund and to rule changes in the common bond, but let us bear in mind that the credit union movement in this country is geographically incomplete. There are great swathes of the country that simply do not have credit unions and many of those that do exist are quite fragile and are run by volunteers who keep them operating, just. At the moment, credit unions serve just 1.5 per cent. of the population. We cannot look to credit unions as a vehicle by which to deliver radical reform of the social fund. The social fund needs to be recapitalised. We have heard this in respect of the banks but it is actually the problem with the budgeting loan part of the social fund, which is undercapitalised. It has about £500 million revolving around it, paid out and coming back in as repayments from those who have got a loan. It supports about 1 million loans a year. But that level of funding simply is not enough. I urge the Government to blow the dust of KPMG's feasibility study from last year which examines—I think interestingly—the possibility of a public-private partnership to expand the social fund by bringing in some private capital. The report concluded that at that time there was little appetite among the private-sector banks for lending to what they referred to as the deep sub-prime sector. There is an irony in that, as the banks did that on a gigantic scale for many years and said it was exactly the right thing to do. They gambled working people's money on that, and they are now being bailed out with more money from working people, and in a way that I think will pitch even more people into financial exclusion. In these circumstances, the least they can do is reconsider the possibility of giving some capital support to a joint private-public budgeting loans scheme. The banks might say to us—I had conversations with them on these matters when I was exploring the idea—that the loans are pretty risky. I point out to them that the level of default on budget loan repayment is very low and that this is nothing like as risky as the activity the banks themselves have been engaging in for a number of years. The banks might also say—they said this to me—that it is too costly and ask, ““Exactly how much do you want to put into this recapitalised amount?”” I think the level of recapitalisation needed is such that it would increase the pool of money in the budgeting loan fund about fivefold. Therefore, we would be looking at about £2.5 billion of private capital to be put into the pot in order to meet the demand. Is £2.5 billion too much to ask the banks to put into such a joint venture? Well, we should set that question against the fact that last year alone—which was not a good year for the banks—they managed to find £3.6 billion in bonus payments. The amount of capital I would look for from the private sector is, therefore, less than it is prepared to pay out in bonuses. If a £3.6 billion reward for incompetence can be afforded, resources for financial inclusion of £2.5 billion can also be afforded. I also think that the vast majority of people who take out a budgeting loan have a better sense of fiscal responsibility than many of the bankers who have driven massive financial institutions into the ground. Just before Christmas, the Government had a spot of difficulty with this proposal because the idea got out that it would mean the introduction of interest payments on loans offered under the revised budgeting loans fund. May I suggest to the Government the scheme we should be thinking about, which completely avoids that problem? An applicant would come forward in exactly the same way as now, through Jobcentre Plus, and they would be referred to the fund for a loan, but they would then open an account with the fund, so that they would register with it and a relationship would be built between the applicant and the social fund. They would then have access to a certain amount of money from the social fund interest free. That sum might be capped at a certain amount per year; it might be enough to facilitate three, or possibly four, budgeting loans during the year—sums of £1,500 or £2,000, perhaps, although this issue would need a little more exploration. Beyond that, they would also have access to money advice, which is not part of the budgeting loans scheme at all at present, and beyond that, under the joint scheme I am proposing, they would have access to affordable credit above and beyond the amount that is interest free, and that would be drawn from the capital put in by the private sector, and should probably be charged at interest rates of about 1 to 2 per cent. per month. This proposal, therefore, retains the interest-free loan facility, but also allows access to affordable credit. Why is it important to do that? Because we have to close the debt trap that many of the customers of the budgeting loan fall into. If they cannot get a budgeting loan, for the earlier reasons I mentioned, where do they go? They go to doorstep lenders—and they might go to legal doorstep lenders who are charging 170 per cent. interest, or others charging about 300 per cent. or to those at the margins of legality charging 1,000 per cent. or more. It is to avoid people having to go to such lengths and falling into a perpetual debt trap as a result that I would like to see this facility built in under a private-public partnership, to allow a universal access to low-cost credit in a way that the credit unions cannot provide because they are not yet universal in provision. If we had this sort of scheme, we could link it into other things that are happening, such as the advice from a personal job adviser. It could also be part of the work readiness preparation or be linked to the savings gateway. This is a more radical approach to resolving the problems with the budgeting loans. I urge the Government to take the opportunity presented by the Bill and agree to amendments, which I hope they will consider, to take the powers to do this. That would at least provide an opportunity to pursue it at some point in the future. I ask the Government to consider that.