I emphasise again that without seeing the Minister’s detailed working I will sustain the figures I have, unless, until or if the Minister can show me the points at which they are inaccurate. Is it 88% of widows with children in work who will be worse off, and 57% of those not in work who will be worse off? To put it another way, any widow with children who would have claimed for two years or more will in future be worse off. It may be that the Minister has not fully taken into account the cohort effect with regard to the point people at which join the labour market. Obviously, we should continue this in correspondence.
My noble friend Lord Browne pressed the Minister hard and showed again that targets interlocking with financial need are going to leave very many widowed parents in a far worse position. He encouraged the Minister to consult further with the Childhood Bereavement Network group of voluntary organisations to see whether a rearrangement of these benefits can meet some of our concerns. I am pleased that the Minister is willing to do this. He also argued not just for a reconsideration but, if necessary, a review, especially as regards cohabiting parents. If the Minister is serious about trying to bring benefits up to date, he should recognise that 50% of all children are now born outside marriage, even though the relationship may be an entirely stable one with two committed parents. The Minister deploys the argument of bringing structures up to date to suit his case, but apparently refuses to recognise other people’s positions. He is obviously right to want to continue to keep all benefits under review as an act of stewardship. However, if he is going to take account of this changed world, he is selecting what factors he chooses to take account of and ignoring others that are equally significant—and possibly in many ways more so—in their effects on families and their children.
The Minister made several points. First, as regards structure, I accept that we need to review it but I think that he is going about it the wrong way. Secondly, as regards money, he paraded the gainers against the losers and implied that somehow that is all right because there is some mythical average. It is not all right and I am sure we will come back to that point. The point on which he was least persuasive was that of conditionality. He seems to think that when you have lost a spouse and your children are very insecure, fearful and frightened, and need the surviving parent’s full-time attention, six months’ relief from conditionality is generous. I would tell him that he needs to live in the
world that such parents inhabit. It really is not generous. He is making the comparison with, say, a single parent under UC. I accept that a widowed parent in that situation would be more generously placed in terms of work conditionality than a single parent unaffected by widowhood would be under UC, but that is not the point we are making.
I cannot believe that the noble Lord is deliberately bypassing this point. Our knowledge of what those widowed parents and their children experience was built into the previous structure that is now being abandoned. There is an apparent reliance on the fact that the relevant provision is somewhat better than UC, and therefore what have we got to complain about? The Minister needs to ponder some of the literature which the noble Lord, Lord German, identified; perhaps he has. It may shape his perception of this issue of work conditionality. He is so completely wrong on this that I am puzzled because I know that he tries to enter into the situation of recipients of benefit.
Finally, the Minister referred to kinship carers and charmingly boasted that he had been responsible for making their situation better. I am very glad indeed that he did, but the lesson I draw from that is that widowed parents should now turn themselves into kinship carers. Is it his intention to make the regime harsher for the parent and their children who are suffering grief than is likely to be the case for kinship carers, given that the latter are nearly always grandparents? I know they are nearly always grandparents as I have done some work on this. Is it the Minister’s intention that the regime should be harsher for the widowed parent with children than for a grandparent caring for the children, particularly if the maternal grandparent is involved who has suffered not the direct loss of a son but, say, that of a son-in-law? Is that what he is really arguing? I wonder how much experience he or his team have had of engaging with families in that situation. I would hope that at the very least he will take away from this the argument that whatever he may or may not be able to do in terms of budgets and cost neutrality—and that may follow discussions with the voluntary groups, which we welcome—he will at least extend his empathy for kinship carers, which we respond to and recognise, to the similar group of widowed parents, and at the very least not deploy work conditionality until a year has passed. That would at least go some way to meeting our concerns. Unless the Minister wants to respond to me further now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.