Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill

My Lords, this Bill will impact hardest on the poorest in society and on disabled children who at some time between the ages of 14 and 24 move from better funded children's services to more Spartan adult services and who might have used this premium, this sum of money, either to go to college or to buy equipment for their disability. As the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, said, it will impact on children coming out of care who often have no family support. The £8,000 a year might have been used, for example, to take driving lessons to improve their work prospects. Ministers talk blandly about corporate parents—local authorities—at the very same time as Mr Pickles is cutting local authority money by 30 per cent and local authorities cannot even protect statutory services. It is complacency gone mad. The Saving Gateway would especially have benefited women and people from BME communities, most of whom have negligible assets and no ability to aid their children. Also, the Government said—and this was repeated by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes—that the health and pregnancy grants were unfocused, rather like the winter fuel payments to pensioners, perhaps. Why do so many people believe that pregnant women cannot be trusted to spend a grant wisely, but there is no attempt to supervise pensioners in southern Spain enjoying the winter fuel allowance? As Katherine Rake said in her expert evidence, for low-income women pregnancy is the route into poverty, yet the Government are removing a useful resource. Why does the Bill and so much of the Government’s strategy fall on the weakest and the poorest rather than on those who have broader shoulders? The Government have abandoned their manifesto promise to target these policies on the more vulnerable and have provided no equality impact analysis, no doubt because it would make deeply uncomfortable reading. Why exactly do the Government need to incentivise the better-off like me with 40 per cent tax relief on savings, worth up to £11,000 a year, even under the current regime? Why do I need incentivising, yet the poorest among us do not, even though the sums expended will be modest by comparison and their incomes infinitely lower? I think the junior ISA is remarkably silly. All the evidence shows that people are putting more money into ISAs and pensions at the moment because of ease of access, yet the junior ISA will lock money away for 18 years with limited tax relief because it is designed to help the poorest. So it will combine the worst effects of ISAs with the worst effects of pensions. If there is any spare money, it should go into an adult ISA instead. As I say, it is a remarkably foolish idea. In debates in the other place, the committee on the Bill took several days of expert evidence—a practice followed in the Commons since 2006 and much to be welcomed—from the IFS, the IPPR, the Family and Parenting Institute, credit unions, Scope, 4Children, the Royal College of Midwives, the National Childbirth Trust and so on. They and the committee discussed, for example, the need for more health visitors, the high risk of miscarriage in the first trimester, which is why the health in pregnancy grant did not come early enough, Gypsies, credit unions, the cost of second-hand buggies, disability needs, the Child Support Agency, folic acid, free prescriptions, financial education, Sure Start, the collapse of Farepak, tuition fees and the pupil premium. All this expert policy discussion was around a so-called money Bill. If it was a money Bill, why on earth take evidence from expert witnesses on its policy implications? No previous money Bill has. No one at any stage, including the Minister in his evidence, suggested that this was a money matter. Indeed, reference was made to further consideration and report back from the Lords in the normal way. As my right honourable friend Mr Hanson said, this is a deeply political Bill. Committee members fully understood the policy significance of these measures. It was treated throughout as a social policy Bill as, indeed, I believe it to be. If so, why is this social policy Bill coming to us as a money Bill, which means today that we are all in effect wasting our time? I went back to the 1910 debates to seek to understand how the Speaker on advice could have made the ruling he did. The Lords in 1909 had rejected the Lloyd George Budget and the Commons discussed whether it was entitled to do so. A route out was suggested by Mr Asquith, leader of the Liberals, that the Speaker should rule on what was a money Bill. Balfour, the Conservative leader, had some prescient words to say. He argued that the Liberals were making, "““Mr. Speaker into an arbiter … it will rest with the Speaker of one House of Parliament not merely to say what the duties of that House are, but to say whether a particular Bill shall become law or shall not become law. He becomes not merely the guardian of our rights, but, in a certain sense, the author of our legislation. He is to say whether or not a certain Bill is one that this House can pass over the heads of another place. I do not know whether that is a wise addition to Mr. Speaker's powers””.—[Official Report, Commons, 29/3/1910; col. 1189.]." Why did Mr Balfour hesitate? He hesitated because of the fears expressed all around the Commons of what was then called ““tacking””: that is, adding on to Finance Bills or money Bills matters of policy extraneous to them in order to bypass the Lords. As Balfour put it, "““bringing forward Bills which are in form purely Money Bills for objects which are not purely money objects””.—[Official Report, Commons, 29/3/1910; col. 1190.]." That concern was shared by the Liberal Herbert Gladstone. From reading those debates and the Parliament Act, either this Bill is not a money Bill or almost all Bills, from social security to defence, are money Bills. I have taken two Tax Credits Bills through your Lordships' House and was much aided by opposition contributions and some of their amendments. In my view, those Bills had as much or as little claim to be regarded as money Bills as this Bill. Speaker Lowther in 1914 seemed to put the matter to rest when he said: "““It is desirable ... to keep the Bill which imposes taxes upon the people separate from the Bill which proposes to expend the money derived from the imposition of those taxes””." His assumption was that the first was a money Bill, but the second was not. Finance Bills he went on, should be confined, "““to the imposition of taxes, and arrangements for dealing with the National Debt, and so forth””.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/6/1914; col. 1509.]" I turned to Erskine May to see how the debate had moved on. It had not. Essentially it follows Speaker Lowther's ruling. It states: "““No serious practical difficulty normally arises in deciding whether a particular bill is or is not a ‘money bill’””," and that, "““even if the main object of a bill is to create a new charge on the Consolidated Fund or on money provided by Parliament, the bill will not be certified if it is apparent that the primary concern of the charge is not purely financial””—" a point that was established by my noble friend Lady Thornton. Over the years, fewer and fewer Bills have been designated as money Bills. All the constitutional experts I have consulted in the past week or two do not believe this to be a money Bill. We are not talking about papal infallibility; we are talking about judgment, and I believe that a wrong call was made. During the past three years, three Bills have been certified as money Bills by the Speaker, over and beyond conventional Finance Bills: that is, the Equitable Life (Payments) Bill 2010, the Fiscal Responsibility Bill 2009 and the Industry and Exports (Financial Support) Bill 2008-09. There was some debate as to whether today’s Superannuation Bill was a money Bill. It, too, took witnesses, and the Commons and the Speaker decided that it was not. We had its Third Reading just minutes ago. I believe that all those decisions were correct. They followed Speaker Lowther and Erskine May. I do not believe that this Bill does. Surely no one would argue that setting up, say, a child trust fund is not a money Bill when it is introduced, but is a money Bill when it is altered or scrapped. If there is social policy behind its introduction, there are social policy consequences for its abolition. Why does it matter? Let us take child and maternal welfare, disability, foetal health and nutrition, mental health and depression, and debt and credit unions. Almost all those topics, which were explored in the Commons committee on this Bill, have been debated by your Lordships in the past. I hope that the other House would agree that this House, especially its Cross-Benchers, has expertise, experience, knowledge and practice that are unrivalled in the other place. Why is that? Because in the other place, Members represent communities of locality: their constituencies. We do not, but most of us have come from, or represent or speak for, communities of interest: that is, disabled people, pensioners, asylum seekers or perhaps, as today, children in care. Most of us are presidents, patrons or chairs of major voluntary organisations and charities, which look to us, in a way that no MP properly can, to speak for communities of interest that are based not on place but on people perhaps scattered across the land and often barely visible or heard. That, together with the careful way in which we revise and suggest amendments, seems to me to be why this House is so valuable. Yet your Lordships have no power whatever to amend this Bill or to influence its outcome in any way. In no way can we ask the Commons to think again about the impact of this Bill on communities of interest, of which many of us may have considerable knowledge. Of course the Commons has the final word, but surely it should not exclude from consideration our words and views on matters of such social policy. I repeat; if this ruling becomes a precedent, some of us might as well go home. If in this House we cannot affect policy on social welfare, poverty, child and maternal health, tax credits and benefits, and ask the Commons to think again, what exactly are we here for? We are redundant. We will not need Lords reform. Our purpose will have been severely curtailed ahead even of possible reforms to our membership. Surely that is not wise—that is, if we believe in a two-Chamber Parliament. More importantly, perhaps, surely it is not decent that our ability in this House to speak out for—and, I hope, to defend— some of the most voiceless and powerless in the land should be curtailed in this way. It is wrong, profoundly wrong.