HC Deb 14 February 1977 vol 926 cc213-22

Amendments made: No. 28, in page 21, line 40, leave out 'and 14(3)' and insert '14(3) and 15'.

No. 29, in page 22, line 1, at beginning insert 'Section 18(2A) of this Act shall come into force on 4th April 1977 and'.—[Mr. Orme.]

12.38 a.m.

Mr. Orme

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

This has been a contentious Bill. I am entitled to use this occasion to place on record and beyond doubt the contradictory attitude of the Opposition. The avowed purpose of this Bill is to make economies in public expenditure. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary and I have made this clear on every occasion. There is an urgent need, following the July measures, to make savings in public expenditure. The proposals in the Bill represent my Department's contribution to the public expenditure savings. But I have repeatedly said that the Bill's proposals make savings which do no damage to the basic structure of the social security schemes. Indeed, those schemes are fully protected in all their essentials.

These savings are no more than our contribution towards the total savings needed. The Opposition showed their attitude on the issue of occupational pensions and unemployment benefit. I understand the arguments of my hon. Friends on these topics. The Government listened to them. The Opposition's arguments were hypocritical on these issues, as they also were on the earnings rule. Their attitude on the Floor of the House has been different from that shown in Committee. The right hon. Member for Wanstead and Woodford (Mr. Jenkin) not only voted for the removal of the £45 million saving but he colluded with the hon. Member for Rochdale (Mr. Smith) in respect of the hon. Member's amendment. We saw the same attitude in New Clause 2, which was put down for debate tonight. That would have led to additional expenditure, as also would New Clause 3.

I do not say that the objectives behind some of the proposals put to us might not in themselves and in better times be desirable, and I recognise the convention that amendments rejected in Committee on the Chairman's casting vote reappear on Report, but I am entitled to make two observations. First, the progress of the Bill has revealed the humbug and hypocrisy with which the Opposition have approached the whole subject of public expenditure. The official Opposition constantly call for greater restraint in general, but they are very ready to oppose specific proposals for cuts when they are made in a Bill.

Second—I ask my hon. Friends to note this—throughout the proceedings on the Bill I have detected an undercurrent in the Opposition's attitude, that is the idea that it is right to resist measures which, taken as a whole, would adversely affect the better off, and instead to favour measures which hit hardest the poorer and more disadvantaged sections of our community. This became much more than an undercurrent when the hon. Lady the Member for Wallasey (Mrs. Chalker) said in Committee that one of the ways of making the original proposal in the Bill on unemployment benefit for occupational pensioners unnecessarily would be to raise the revenue by increasing prescription charges. We one this side utterly reject that attitude.

I assure the House—I stress this to my hon. Friends in particular—that the consequent increase in expenditure will be contained within the planned level of total public expenditure set out in the recent White Paper CMnd. 6721, Part 1. There will therefore be much less available for spending on other measures.

Despite the difficulties and arguments which we have had, positive proposals have been made and the Bill will be of value. It will assist the mobility allowance, it will ease the present position in connection with benefits arising from industrial diseases, and it will make other small easements in connection with unemployment benefit and claims to benefit generally. It also tidies up some of the recent social security legislation to remove doubts and allow smoother administration. I therefore commend the Bill to the House for a Third Reading.

12.43 a.m.

Mr. Patrick Jenkin

For a speech made at nearly a quarter to one in the morning, that was a quite astonishingly belligerent effort. I cannot understand why the right hon. Gentleman should want to sit here till a late hour listening to the speeches of my hon. Friends whom he will thus have provoked, and still less can I understand it when, in the first debate today, I went overboard to try to demonstrate to him what a responsible Opposition we are. We have accepted a large part of his argument on the earnings rule, and his Bill as a result has most of the savings which he intended to gain by it.

The remarkable feature of the Bill, however, is not what is in it but what is not. The right hon. Gentleman flings charges of humbug and hypocrisy across the Floor and criticises us for our attitude on Clause 4. Apparently, he forgets —I am surprised that he does, since I had not thought that he ever would—that, together with his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, he faced the united hostility of the entire House on the proposal to disallow occupational pensioners' entitlement to unemployment benefit. There was not a single speaker in the entire Second Reading debate who supported that provision; nor had there been when the Government's predecessor tried to introduce a similar clause in 1971; nor had there been when the right hon. Gentleman the then Minister of State sought to introduce the same proposal in 1969. The House has always made it clear that it was not prepared to wear that one.

What I will say about the two right hon. Gentlemen is that they have in that matter shown the same wisdom as my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, North-East (Sir K. Joseph) when, having been roundly defeated in Committee—and they were more heavily defeated than was my right hon. Friend—they accepted the logic of the situation and did not seek to reintroduce the clause on Report. Why that should be regarded as a matter of obloquy for the Opposition I fail to see.

Then there was the question of the students. To blame the Opposition for what has happened to the students is nonsense. The clause as originally introduced would have saved £1 million gross and £600,000 net. The right hon. Gentleman admitted that now the clause will not save that amount. That is not our fault. We are prepared to support it. I made it clear in Committee that if the right hon. Gentleman brought forward a logical, sensible and coherent system of support for students—a system that met the cases of householders, students with dependants and students who had flats for which they had to continue to pay rent during the vacation, and if, at the same time, he could say that it would save money, it would have our support. But he did not produce such a clause. Instead we had the Minister of State, Department of Education making an absurd speech, trying to show that the Department of Education was behind the Department of Health and Social Security.

This is a very miscellaneous Bill. It is undoubtedly more miscellaneous than when it came here for Second Reading. Nevertheless, we do not think that we should oppose it on Third Reading. In particular, the main proposals the Government have gone a long way towards making out their case by admitting that their earlier figures on the earnings rule were wrong. Although we are committed to phasing out the earnings rule as quickly as we can, at the present juncture it would not be right to support a move that would deprive the Government of the necessary savings that they think they will make.

In conclusion, in kindness to the Under-Secretary, who, I think his right hon. Friends will agree, has borne the heat and burden of the day here and upstairs and for the greater part of today, I must say that he has dealt with the debates with great skill and courtesy and has done his best often to try to answer the unanswerable case put forward by my hon. Friends.

At the same time, I want to express my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Mrs. Chalker), who has had a much longer experience of the complexities of the social security provisions —[Interruption.] I am grateful for being corrected— "my hon. and charming Friend", whose experience of social security legislation is a great deal longer than mine and—upon whose broad shoulders, I was going to say, but that might be regarded as ungallant—on whose sturdy back I have leant heavily. [Interruption.] Any squash player will agree that the dorsal muscles are most important, and my hon. Friend is no mean squash player. I have relied upon her experience and knowledge of this legislation during the passage of the Bill and I thank her very much. To all my other hon. Friends who supported us upstairs and today, I also express my thanks.

I do not think that this Bill is the greatest that ever lived, but in the circumstances we shall not seek to prevent its reaching the statute book tonight.

12.50 a.m.

Mr. Cyril Smith

I suppose that the only Member who will compliment the hon. Member for Rochdale (Mr. Smith) is the hon. Member for Rochdale, since he was the only Liberal who served on the Committee. Tory and Labour speakers regularly congratulate their hon. Friends on excellent speeches and their grasp of the subject but when there is only one of you, the only person to give you compliments is yourself. I should like to be associated with the tributes to the Under-Secretary of State. I was impressed by the way in which he dealt with the Bill and his knowledge of the subject.

I am sorry that the Minister of State found it necessary to make such a speech moving the Third Reading. It did not do him much credit and was not worth making. In effect he said that if the Government cannot persuade their own Members to vote for their legislation, the Opposition should make sure it gets through. Three of the eight Government Members in the Committee voted against the clause which caused his outburst. As the right hon. Member for Wanstead and Woodford (Mr. Jenkin) said, on Second Reading many Labour Members spoke against that clause dealing with occupational pensions which seems to have got the Minister of State so worked up.

Many hon. Members were opposed to the clause and voted against it because it was a rotten clause and a bad proposition. That is surely what the House is for. The Government cannot expect to get their own way all the time. Ministers should not get all egged up at the Dispatch Box because they have not got their own way on one clause and say that everyone else is irresponsible. It was a rotten clause and we were right to throw it out. I congratulate all those, including myself, who helped to throw it out: it got its just desserts.

I understand the Minister of State's problem about expenditure. I have not found it easy to vote against the Government on some clauses, for economic reasons. But I shall always take the view that as a Member of Parliament I can only judge a Bill on its merits. I am not consulted by the Government—I do not complain: it is a statement of fact—about where cuts should fall. I am merely told and left to vote for or against them. Therefore, if I do not agree with a cut, I am surely entitled to vote against it without being belaboured. It would be fair to belabour me if I were given the opportunity to say where the cuts should fall, but I do not have that opportunity. All that I can do is vote for or against the legislation as it comes before us. That is what I have done on this Bill.

The Committee on the Bill was a happy one. I have served on others which were quite violent. Although we differed, at least we agreed to differ. I did not feel there was any sourness on the Committee. It was the first social security Committee on which I have served. I do not know whether it will be the last; it probably will, because I voted against the Government too much, and the Committee of Selection will not allow that. But I enjoyed it.

I do not intend to vote against Third Reading. I have made my points, which it was right that I should make, and I believe that I did so in pursuit of the true principles of democracy.

12.54 a.m.

Mr. Richard Wood (Bridlington)

I must apologise for delaying hon. Members' departure. I offer the assurance to any who are still suffering under the lash of the Government Whips' Office that I have no intention of dividing the House on Third Reading.

I feel a little timid about entering this discussion at such a late hour, but I was encouraged by remembering that the labourers in the vineyard who were hired at the eleventh hour received exactly the same reward—not that it was very princely by today's standards—as those who had borne the heat and burden of the day, such as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wanstead and Woodford (Mr. Jenkin) and the hon. Member for Rochdale (Mr. Smith).

I wanted to make this speech six or seven hours ago. I hope that I may be forgiven for making it now, because it is about a subject that is very close to my heart, one that I want to share with hon. Members. I refer to the mobility allowance, which is dealt with in Clause 11. I want to put a rather more general point that my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Mrs. Chalker) raised in her amendment, which was generously conceded by the Minister responsible for the disabled.

The mobility allowance has on many earlier occasions, and in Committee and on Report, obviously won great favour and had a warm welcome—I think a warmer welcome than it might have had, if some of the implications of the change which Clause 11 carries a stage further had been fully appreciated. The change has been of obvious benefit to many people. But there are others who would have achieved a certain mobility under the old system for whom mobility will now not only be difficult but in some cases almost impossible.

I am not arguing the case for the present Invacar drivers. That would be out of order, and there will be other opportunities. The Secretary of State knows my anxiety very well. But the sum total of the provisions for the allowance which will exist when the Bill receives the Royal Assent will leave certain groups of very severely disabled people, especially the young and those who are disabled this year or in years to come, in real difficulties.

I am connected with an organisation called Queen Elizabeth's Foundation for the Disabled, which in one of its units teaches the basic technique of living. I hope that I am not speaking melodramatically in saying that. It seems to me that spontaneous mobility is essential to that basic technique. For many people no mobility allowance involving the occasional use of hired transport can take the place of their former entitlement or the entitlement they would have had, if the system had not been changed, to a vehicle of their own. That is so, no matter how generous the right hon. Gentlemen may make the allowance. In any event, some disabled people cannot use hired transport.

The old system, with its Invacars and in spite of all their inadequacies, to a large extent replaced the legs of a very severely disabled person, and it made possible spontaneous movement. Its removal destroys for many, who will anyway live very limited lives, the whole possibility of doing anything on the spur of the moment.

I should like hon. Members to put themselves in the position of a disabled person who wants to do something perfectly ordinary outside the house, such as posting a leter, buying a paper, or going to the pub. How is he to do it? He can call a taxi, if he is on the telephone and can get into a taxi, but many taxi drivers lack the strength and some even lack the will to give the necessary physical help. If he goes by taxi, what does he do with it when he gets to the pub? Does he keep it waiting, or ask the driver to come back later? What happens if he cannot find anything to take him home?

The Minister has shown himself very anxious to improve the mobility allowances, both in scale and application. They are largely welcomed, by myself included. Although they will be of benefit to many, I do not believe—and I hope the right hon. Gentleman does not believe—that they are a perfectly satisfactory answer to the problems that I have mentioned.

My main concern has been with younger people and people of middle age who are perhaps newly disabled. I am also worried about people who face an old age of sadly restricted mobility. I doubt whether any of us, including the Government, expect this Bill to be the last word of a civilsed, if at the momnt rather impoverished, society on the subject of mobility. All I am asking is for recognition by the right hon. Gentleman and the Minister for the disabled, both of whom are men of great humanity, that the new and in many ways more enlightened system does not solve all the problems but in fact accentuates some of them.

I beg the Minister to continue to search for ways of restoring, or providing for the first time in the lives of some very severely disabled people, the precious gift of spontaneous mobility which most of us here naturally take for granted.

1.1 a.m.

Mr. Peter Bottomley

That distinctive and persuasive speech by my right hon. Friend shows that the labourer who came at the eleventh hour was worthy of his hire.

I have been persuaded to speak because of the Minister's bellicose Third Reading speech. The reason for that was that it was typed before the end of the Report stage and could not take into account the reasonable and responsible attitude of the Conservative Opposition.

The only point I wish to make is on the Minister's comment that the Conservative side was trying to hit the poorest hardest. That is an offensive remark coming from a Government who are being taken to court by three old-age pensioners for changing the basis of the calculation of the uprating of the retirement pensions, and from a Government which refuses to legislate for uprating or at least reviewing the level of child benefit.

1.2 a.m.

Mr. Newton

I should like to add a word. None of us had any intention of speaking on Third Reading until we heard the Minister's speech. We were all agreed that we would not have a long Third Reading.

Many of my hon. Friends were much angered by the rather stupid remarks that the Minister made about the attitude of the Opposition, especially in the light of the Government's attitude during the course of the Bill. There is little point hurling abuse at this hour and my only excuse is that the Minister started it.

I should like to make two points. First, the Minister stated that in the course of meeting the Treasury's demands for cuts in public expenditure, which we all understand, he thought that had done no damage to the fundamental structure of the social security system. I ask him to consider whether he really means that about a Bill which started off by seeking to withdraw unemployment pay from people who were unquestionably entitled to it under the rules of the scheme and which has now written into it a provision which says that people shall be assessed on income which they do not in fact have. Whether they have it or not the Supplementary Benefits Commission will not deal with them on the basis of the income they have.

Perhaps that is necessary. Perhaps the Treasury has imposed that and perhaps even the Minister is proud of it. But to say that this does no damage to the fundamental structure of the social security system is absolute rubbish, and the Minister must know that it is.

The other point I should like to make is slightly more generous to the Minister because in fairness to him and to the Parliamentary Secretary the general spirit in which they conducted discussions on the Bill was better than the spirit in which the Minister conducted his Third Reading speech. As the hon. Member for Rochdale (Mr. Smith) will know, far from having an unpleasant Committee upstairs we had a very civilised and reasonable Committee stage.

I therefore conclude by saying that I actually feel sorry for the Minister. I suspect that his outbursts of spleen are due to his having had a miserable time bringing before the House proposals with which he himself does not agree. We have seen the Chief Secretary to the Treasury sitting alongside the Minister on several occasions, undoubtedly to prevent any backsliding and to ensure that what the Treasury wanted was carried out. That is not a comfortable position for a social security Minister, and in that sense the right hon. Gentleman deserves our sympathy, but not to the extent of venting his frustration and unhappiness at some of the damage he has had to do on the Opposition.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.