Department of Social Security

HC Deb 11 March 1996 vol 273 cc651-85

[Relevant documents: The Fifth Report from the Social Security Committee of Session 1994–95 on the Work of the Department of Social Security and its Agencies (House of Commons Paper No. 382); the Government Reply thereto (Cm. 3148); and the Social Security Departmental Report: The Government's Expenditure Plans 1995–96 to 1997–98 (Cm. 2813).]

Motion made, and Question proposed,

That a further supplementary sum not exceeding £19,355,000 be granted to Her Majesty out of the Consolidated Fund to complete or defray the charges which will come in course of payment during the year ending on 31st March 1996 for expenditure by the Department of Social Security on administration, for agency payments, the promotion of Government policy on disability issues, and for certain other services including grants to local authorities and voluntary organisations.—[Mr. Andrew Mitchell.]

3.37 pm

Mr. Frank Field (Birkenhead)

I am grateful for the opportunity for this debate, for which we thank the Liaison Committee and partly also the Department, whose supplementary estimate is such that it will allow hon. Members to speak on any aspect of its work and remain in order. I spent some time trying to think of an aspect of the Department's work that would be out of order, but I could not think of one. Perhaps other hon. Members will be more effective than me in that respect.

In opening the debate, I shall concentrate on one topic to which we gave some prominence in our fifth report on the work of the Department and its agencies and which we debated in the House last week, debated in Committee and have another opportunity to debate today—fraud. I wish to take the debate on and suggest some changes in its nuances that I believe are important not only for the House but for the taxpayers—those who are in work and who contribute £15 every day from their pay towards underwriting the social security budget.

First, I emphasise the importance of housing benefit fraud committed by landlords rather than that committed by claimants. Those who have heard me speak before know that I think fraud is wrong full stop, but as any Administration will have limited resources to combat fraud, it is sensible to deploy the resources in those areas where it is most prevalent. I fear that there may have been a difference in emphasis between the Select Committee on Social Security and the Secretary of State on that. When we questioned him on that aspect on Wednesday, we talked about evidence of landlord fraud and he said to the hon. Member for Harrow, West (Mr. Hughes), "Not evidence—assertions".

I was referring to the evidence that the London borough of Haringey has put together. It has carried out a survey of landlords who have more than 30 claims paid direct to them every week. On the first 15 cases, the borough has carried out 1,300 visits so far—that is one borough, for a survey that is, so far, incomplete. That contrasts vividly with the Government's survey of housing benefit fraud, which they carried out throughout the country and which covered 4,500 claims. I am talking not about 4,500 investigations, but about 4,500 claimants, who were asked about their claims. If they could remember accurately what they had said when they first claimed benefit, no further investigations were undertaken.

Although the Government publicised that as a fraud survey, it was slightly misleading to the House and to those outside to do so because they were testing people's memories. I have a bad memory and would probably have failed to answer the questions correctly. I would not be able to remember what I said when I originally made a claim, which might have spurred the Government into further action by suggesting that there was fraud. The Government undertook, not a fraud inquiry, but a test of memory.

Let us consider the Haringey inquiry about which the Secretary of State was somewhat dismissive in the Select Committee. It was not carrying out a memory test. It has called at properties to question landlords and claimants where a landlord has more than 30 housing benefit claims paid directly to him in any one week. The council checked the national insurance number of each claimant and asked for further evidence from utility bills. It also checked in other boroughs whether double claims were being made and studied council tax payments.

For this debate, I asked Haringey to give us information on the first 15 landlords on which it called. I emphasise that those were landlords who had more than 30 housing benefit claims paid directly to them each week. I asked Haringey what the fraud rate was. Obviously, I will not read out the names of the landlords concerned or their agents as that would be unfair. I will refer to them by number.

The first landlord called on as part of the survey had 112 housing benefit claims paid direct to him each week—more than £13,000 was paid direct to that landlord in housing benefit—and 25 per cent. were shown by the Haringey anti-fraud inquiry to be fraudulent. The second landlord had 111 direct claims for housing benefit paid to him each week, totalling more than £13,000 of public money, and the fraud rate was 23 per cent. The third landlord had only 39 direct claims for housing benefit paid to him each week, totalling almost £3,000 a week of public money, and the fraud rate was 67 per cent.

The fourth landlord had 46 direct payments made to him every week, totalling some £4,000, and 26 per cent. were found to be fraudulent. The fifth landlord had 111 claims directly paid to him or her every week, totalling some £11,000, and 16 per cent. were shown to be fraudulent. The sixth landlord had 121 direct payments made to him every week, totalling almost £8,000 from public funds, and 15 per cent. were shown to be fraudulently claimed. The seventh landlord had 141 claims paid directly to him or her every week, totalling almost £9,000 from public funds, and 11 per cent. were fraudulently claimed.

The eighth landlord had 42 claims paid directly, totalling almost £8,000 a week, and 33 per cent. were shown to be fraudulent. The ninth landlord had 112 claims paid directly, totalling almost £11,000 a week, and 59 per cent. were shown to be fraudulent. The 10th landlord had 69 claims paid directly each week, totalling more than £6,000 of public funds, and 29 per cent. were found to be fraudulent. The 11 th landlord had 58 claims paid directly to him or her a week, totalling more than £7,000, and 15 per cent. were shown to be fraudulent.

The 12th landlord had 100 direct housing payments paid to him each week, totalling almost £17,000, and 10 per cent. were found to be fraudulent. The 13th landlord had 192 housing benefit claims paid directly to him a week, totalling £19,000, and 14 per cent. were shown to be fraudulent. The 14th landlord had 46 direct payments paid each week, totalling £4,000, and the fraud rate was 42 per cent. The 15th landlord had 62 direct claims paid each week, totalling more than £9,000 of public funds, and the fraud rate was more than 16 per cent.

I have put those cases on the record, without naming the landlords or their agents, because I want to support the hon. Member for Harrow, West, who is also a member of the Select Committee on Social Security. When he raised this question with the Secretary of State for Social Security, he was slightly terse with him and said that it was not evidence but assertions. The survey was conducted in Haringey—which happens to be a Labour authority, but would be matched by Westminster. Westminster is equally effective against fraud and it is carrying out a survey of all landlords who have more than 30 claims in housing benefits paid directly to them each week.

The Secretary of State for Social Security (Mr. Peter Lilley)

For the record, my remark about assertions did not relate to the Haringey survey—which sounds extremely interesting. My only remark about the survey was that it involved 15 landlords and, obviously, we will investigate it and study the findings. We have absolutely no vested interest in understating the level of fraud. We are simply here to detect fraud, and to prevent and to deter it in the future. As such, we are at one with the Chairman of the Select Committee on Social Security.

Mr. Field

I have no wish to score points, to be accused by hon. Friends who serve on the Committee of being vicious in the debate or even to be welcomed as crossing the Floor by my own side, as happened in our previous debate. I merely wish to place the evidence on record.

The Secretary of State made a very important contribution to our Select Committee hearing. He said that anti-fraud officers see fraud everywhere—I wish that that were true of all anti-fraud officers, but let us take that statement as being true—and that the important implication of that is that those people should be in the driving seat when we design programmes to combat fraud. He said that they know more about the subject than us and even some officers in the Department, because they are up against it every day. I shall return to that.

It is correct that I have cited only 15 of the 16 cases of which the Secretary of State has heard, and Haringey's survey will be a total survey of all those larger landlords in Haringey, but 1,300 visits have already been made in that borough. That contrasts with a national survey of only 4,500 inquiries by the Department.

I emphasised that in the Haringey survey, national insurance records, utility bills and council tax payment records have been checked and checks have been made with other boroughs, to verify whether claimants exist or are a creation of the landlord. That is a very different exercise from the memory test, which is what I suggest that the Secretary of State was undertaking when he inquired into housing benefit fraud.

I do not oppose memory tests. I merely suggest—I hope that the Under-Secretary of State for Social Security, the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Mitchell), will consider this argument when he replies, or at least convey it to the Department—that the type of inquiry that Haringey has conducted needs to be done throughout the country, so that we do not test claimants' memories but examine what landlords are doing.

Some landlords draw very substantial sums from public funds. They are in a unique position, because they receive a large benefit now, which, even if it is not paid directly into their bank account, goes into their bank account. Every other benefit that the Secretary of State for Social Security pays on the taxpayer's behalf goes to claimants for them to spend. This is a direct transfer payment to a specific group, so it is a very special group. Therefore, a survey similar to the work that Haringey has done should be conducted for the entire country.

Had Westminster, not Haringey, been mentioned in the Select Committee, I would have telephoned Westminster city council and asked for equivalent information to that which Haringey has given us. Both authorities are outstanding in London in combating fraud.

Mr. Tim Smith (Beaconsfield)

On the basis of the sample that the hon. Gentleman mentioned, will he estimate housing benefit fraud throughout the country? Is that fraud perpetrated only by the landlord, or is there a conspiracy between landlord and tenant?

Mr. Field

I am doubly grateful for the hon. Gentleman's intervention because it gives me the opportunity to make it clear that I am not suggesting that fraud is a one-way traffic, undertaken only by landlords. I am saying that it is important that the limited resources that at any one time the Treasury will allow the Department to have to counter fraud are deployed as effectively as possible and that, if we are interested in reducing the social security budget, especially the part boosted by fraud, our efforts should primarily go into areas where the gains will be quickest and biggest; and I am suggesting that the biggest gains would be from landlords. It is difficult for claimants to run a housing benefit fraud racket for any length of time. That is not to say that some of us do not have clever constituents who manage to do that, but it is difficult to do so without the landlord's help. Haringey is finding that many of the tenants whom it checks up on do not exist: they are fictitious tenants created by the landlord or previous tenants who have been recycled by the landlord.

That issue takes me neatly on to my second point. I gained a mere inference from what the Secretary of State said during our discussions last Wednesday that concerned me. I questioned the extent of child benefit fraud.

Mr. Jeremy Corbyn (Islington, North)

Before my hon. Friend leaves the subject of housing benefit, I wish to make a further point. He will recall that during the interview that we had with the Secretary of State last Wednesday, I asked a question about the public spending consequences of the deregulation of rents. Typically, a former council-owned property could be rented for £150 a week in London, whereas the council rent would be about £50 a week, both of which rents might well be paid with housing benefit. The Secretary of State seemed unconcerned by that and unwilling to examine the public spending consequences of rent deregulation. Would it not be appropriate for the Secretary of State seriously to consider that issue? The public purse seems to be creating a large number of millionaire landlords through a process of rent deregulation and the open-ended payment of benefit for whatever rent the landlords choose to set in areas of great poverty and high levels of housing benefit.

Mr. Field

I congratulate my hon. Friend on making his point again in today's debate. I look forward to the Secretary of State rising at the Dispatch Box and shall be happy to give way to him. I also noticed that, when the Secretary of State was replying to my hon. Friend, he raised the important consideration of whether there could be any meaningful market rents in areas where the amount of rented housing stock was still so dependent on one landlord—the public sector. The public owner—the public landlord—could fix the market rate in the area and, by so doing, could determine the extent to which taxpayers would have to foot an increasingly large part of that bill.

Both my hon. Friend's question and the Secretary of State's response to it were intriguing. We did not receive an answer to that question in the Select Committee and have not yet done so today—perhaps the Secretary of State will respond to that question later. If the monopoly landlord is allowed to set the market rent in his area, the Government, and therefore taxpayers, seem to be over a barrel because we taxpayers have to foot the bill.

Mr. David Winnick (Walsall, North)

If what my hon. Friend has said is true—all the evidence sent to him shows that a number of landlords are doing their best to swindle money out of the public purse—what confidence can we have that landlords in the private sector will not swindle their tenants? Does that not demonstrate how right many of us are when we say that people should not be subjected to private landlords when they have no choice? When people cannot buy and cannot obtain local authority accommodation, they are forced to become tenants of landlords such as those whom my hon. Friend has described.

Mr. Field

It is intolerable for our constituents to be in a market where they have no choice because there is only a limited supply of private rented accommodation. If the market was working well, the choice would be greater and the pressures of the market would be applied against the landlords. As my hon. Friend says, our constituents often face Hobson's choice and the more vulnerable they are, the more likely they are to be subjected to that form of aggression by landlords.

I suspect that many hon. Members read the survey in The Sunday Times of housing benefit millionaires—landlords who are in such profitable areas that they draw more than £1 million a year in housing benefit. The survey showed that the treatment of many tenants who existed was undesirable, while other tenants for whom claims had been made did not exist. When pressed to identify the accommodation to which certain claims related, landlords specified, for example, the space under a sink and part of a garage. We should have no illusions about landlords who, up to now, have been able to make easy pickings from the public purse.

As the Select Committee has pointed out, if we are to deal with fraud, we should do so where the gains will be easiest. I do not suggest that fraud of other kinds does not take place—indeed, we may have time to discuss some aspects today—but, for the moment, I wish to concentrate on landlord fraud.

Before that bevy of interventions, I was saying that more child benefit fraud may take place than the Department would like to think. I asked Haringey council whether it had carried out any surveys in relation to fictitious children. As the council is not responsible for the administration of such matters, it had conducted no surveys on child benefit fraud as such, but it checked whether landlords whom it was investigating had included children in their claims for housing benefit. Where children were included, it investigated whether they attended schools and had health records, and whether child benefit was being claimed.

The results of that investigation were staggering. More than 50 per cent. of the children for whom one landlord was claiming housing benefit were found not to exist, and a substantial number of such children in general did not exist. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Miss Hoey) is concerned about women from other European Community countries who come here in the late stages of pregnancy, register the birth of their children here, disappear back to their own countries and then claim child benefit for the next 18 years. That may happen more than the Secretary of State thinks, and it may involve people from outside the European Community as well. We should concentrate anti-fraud campaigns on where fraud is greatest.

After listening to the Secretary of State's speech, I feared that the Department might be rather more interested in the photo-opportunities provided by the local spot checks of which he spoke than in any other aspect, and that the whole campaign might be merely a lead-up to the general election. It would be advantageous for one party to concentrate on claimants, and for the other to concentrate on landlords. I hope that we shall achieve a proper balance in future surveys, and will pay most attention to how we can retrieve the most money for taxpayers when wrongful claims are made.

I have managed to cover quite a few of the topics with which I wanted to deal, but my contribution would not be complete if I did not refer to national insurance numbers. Up to now, the emphasis in debates in the Chamber and in Committee has been on whether the right number of national insurance numbers are being issued. I do not for one moment disagree with the need to make the system secure, but I should like to suggest to the Government a rather different tack on how to accomplish it. My comments are based on events that occurred last Friday: the first happened in my surgery, and the second is from the experience of an anti-fraud officer in London. Neither event relates to whether there are 3 million or 10 million extra numbers floating around the system, but each emphasises how easy it is for national insurance numbers to be used by people other than those to whom they were allocated in the first place.

The anti-fraud officer, while looking for other information on a computer file, found a person's surname with two addresses listed for it, and the two addresses showed two national insurance numbers for the same name. The date of birth was the same for each of the names. The anti-fraud officer came across that information by accident, which suggests—leaving aside the issue of how many spare numbers are floating around the system—that the Government have yet to perform a data-matching exercise on the information that they have. If they had performed such an exercise, that piece of information would have been spat out and made available immediately.

The other example concerns a person who came to my surgery on Friday. He was not my constituent, but the constituent of my right hon. Friend—I rightly call him that—the Member for Wirral, West (Mr. Hunt). The constituent had been in employment all his life. He had one short period of self-employment because he lost his job, although he is now again working for an employer. He phoned the Contributions Agency in Newcastle because he wanted to pay, I believe, his class V contributions, which are made by self-employed people. He was asked to hold while his file was pulled up. He was then told, "You don't owe any money; you're in prison." He said, "I'm not in prison. I want to pay. I've been self-employed."

The man clearly did not realise the significance of the information he was giving me. It suggested that his national insurance number had been used—for how long we do not know—by someone else who had then been imprisoned. His national insurance contribution had been credited while the other person was in prison so that, when he called wishing to make his contributions to the fund for the period in which he was self-employed, he found that his contribution was complete.

A number of people, particularly anti-fraud officers, have suggested that "piggybacking" is much more substantial than we think. The Government, therefore, have a dual task. The first task will be to achieve a secure national system, which will take longer and will be very difficult because of the state of the numbers game, if I can call it that. In such a system, social security numbers should relate only to real people, and numbers that are spare because people die or stop making contributions should be held securely.

The stage beyond that is to decide how we make sure that people do not misuse the system, even if we could secure the safety of the current system of numbers. I previously suggested to the Secretary of State that, just as we are now going to receive notification of our pension contributions each year—what we have paid and what the charges are if we have a personal pension—should not we also be thinking about issuing a national insurance statement each year, showing what we have paid and what benefits we have received?

If we had such a statement, every incident of piggybacking would be reported to the genuine national insurance number holder, and the constituent whom I met on Friday would have received a statement informing him that he was registered as being in prison. It would have been clear that his number had been misused. We hope that his number is not still being used by the person in prison, but we do not know whether the prisoner's family is putting the number to good use.

A simple check would ensure that everyone knew whether his number was being used safely. If statements were issued randomly—not at the end of the financial year—someone involved in piggybacking would not necessarily know when a number's true holder was receiving his statement. We should therefore increase the chances of those misusing other people's numbers being caught.

The purpose of my contribution to today's debate—I am grateful to you, Madam Speaker, for calling me—is to try to change once again the emphasis of the Government's campaign against fraud. I am pleased that the Government have pushed the issue up the agenda and would like to think that the Select Committee has played a small part in concentrating the Department's mind on the importance of the problem. I hope that today's debate might also play a small part in changing the emphasis of the Government's follow-up to the initiative that they announced to the House last week.

4.11 pm

Mr. Tim Smith (Beaconsfield)

I congratulate the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), who is the Chairman of the Select Committee on Social Security, and all the members of the Committee on their work. In many ways, the Select Committee on Social Security is a model Select Committee. It oversees the Department of Social Security's work thoroughly and conscientiously. I have read the Committee's fifth report, entitled "The Work of the Department of Social Security and its Agencies", and believe that it is an excellent report.

I was interested in what the hon. Member for Birkenhead had to say about housing benefit fraud. If one grosses up the percentages that he mentioned—the examples of fraud that he cited varied from 15 per cent. to 67 per cent.—it would appear that the average fraud is around 30 per cent. If the level of housing benefit fraud is anywhere near that figure, there are substantial gains to be made from devoting resources to dealing with that aspect of fraud.

I agree that it is right to devote a finite amount of resources to aspects of social security likely to produce the greatest rewards. Clearly, we should consider landlords claiming large sums every week. The hon. Gentleman cited the case of one landlord who was receiving £19,000 a week in housing benefit, or £1 million a year. That is a substantial sum of taxpayers' money, by any measure. Such cases should be investigated as a matter of urgency. The House debated benefit fraud last week, and there is no doubt that the extra resources that the Department is rightly devoting to it have yielded substantial results. I believe that extra resources would produce further successes.

I was also interested in the hon. Gentleman's idea for an annual statement of contributions for everyone who contributes to the national insurance fund. Last year we improved considerably the rights of members of private occupational pension schemes. As we are talking about millions of people, a substantial cost would be attached to such a statement, but there must be a case for providing regular information to national insurance contributors. An annual statement could usefully include someone's total contributions in a year, the total benefits that people had drawn in that time if they had had the misfortune to be unemployed or sick, and their prospective benefits, about which people start to worry as they approach retirement. They want to be sure that they have the maximum credits and that they will be able to draw a full pension. They want to know what their entitlement to the state earnings-related pension scheme will be. A statement on total prospective benefits would also be useful. People would welcome it.

I am sure that the hon. Member for Birkenhead is right that the total cost of the statement might easily be offset by the gains that would be made through exposing fraud. Obviously, that is impossible to measure, but the amount saved could easily cover the statement's cost. It could be a profitable exercise for taxpayers.

I was struck by one item of information revealed by the Select Committee when it investigated the Child Support Agency, as it has on a number of occasions. I think that I am right in saying that, after the first letter was sent to mothers or fathers on income support and they were asked to respond within eight weeks, many of them went off benefit immediately. That was one of the largest gains from the exercise. There has been much debate about the CSA's costs and benefits, but that substantial benefit to the taxpayer was a by-product of the system. It suggests that, if we communicate with beneficiaries regularly and ask them one or two awkward questions, they may quickly disappear off the map.

Mr. Frank Field

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his contribution, but the question of fraud is even more serious than he suggests. The enormous sums that taxpayers have got back as a result of that first envelope going out are merely the tip of the iceberg, because that does not cover people who are slightly more streetwise and know that the agency's administration is not as we would wish it to be and that, if they merely ignore the letter, the agency probably will not follow it up. I know that the agency would not want to use this language, but it has given an amnesty to parents who, in effect, put two fingers up to taxpayers by not replying to its letters. Those people are slightly more streetwise and know that the agency will never be able to get round to them.

In the first, I think, 18 months, £360 million-worth of books were returned—a substantial sum—but that is a small sum compared with what could be gained if we could only get the agency working effectively, if the amnesty for parents who are refusing to answer questions were withdrawn and if the agency could tackle those people effectively. The gains to taxpayers would be massive.

The hon. Member for Rochdale (Ms Lynne) is here. She piles in questions, the answers to which all put question marks over how well the agency works. The one sector where we never thought the agency would be a success, where it has turned out to be a major success, but where it could be an even bigger success, is in countering fraud.

Mr. Smith

That suggests that, if additional resources were available to the agency and it was able to follow up some of the people who did not reply to its letters, further huge gains could be made. Some people do not receive letters in the first place. Admittedly, they are nothing to do with the CSA, but the implication must be that, if they were written to from time to time, they too might not claim. I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Obviously, it is hard, by definition, to measure fraud, but the taxpayer would probably gain greatly if more resources were devoted to it.

In its fifth report, the Committee looked at the operation of the executive agencies of the Department of Social Security. The DSS is unusual in that almost all its work is carried out through agencies, which means that almost all the money that it spends is spent through agencies. It is a useful case study, and the Department covers the largest agency, the Benefits Agency. I was interested in a comment on that issue by Sir Michael Partridge, who retired recently from the post of permanent secretary at the DSS.

It has always seemed to me that one of the principal advantages of establishing the executive agency system was that for the first time there would be a clear distinction within the civil service between policy advice and policy execution. In that context, what Sir Michael Partridge told the Committee was interesting. He said: In the past I used to sit there with these enormous piles of paper … This was a tremendous waste of time. I now have virtually no paper. So my role has changed much more to thinking about the future, getting my staff to run the Department in a proper way and to be much more accountable to me, much more quickly, and to Ministers, for their performance. I feel I have much more handle on what is happening in the Department and what is going wrong, than I did from trying to spend hours and hours looking at minutiae. Of course, the permanent secretary in any Department, most of whose service delivery is carried out through the agencies, is able to concentrate on policy advice to Ministers, because other people—the chief executives of the agencies, who are also accounting officers—can be held to account by the House and are regularly summoned by Select Committees. That has been a great success, because it has started to change the culture of the civil service.

At one time, those who wanted to get on in the civil service had to be good at advising Ministers—the key was policy advice—and although most of the Department's money was spent on services, delivering them took second place. That has changed a great deal.

In paragraph 75, the Committee reported: A kind of transfer league is developing in Chief Executives. That is good, because some people are coming in from outside. An example is Michael Bichard who, I think, was chief executive of Gloucester city council. He is now the permanent secretary in the Department and he got there by first becoming chief executive of the Benefits Agency. At present, there is as much emphasis on policy execution and on being good at making sure that the Government's customers get a good service as there used to be on policy advice. That is a great improvement, and the DSS has led the field in that respect.

Mr. Corbyn

Has the hon. Gentleman ever thought of the irony of a market developing in highly paid chief executives of these agencies, who force market testing down the throats of low-paid employees in their Departments, make large numbers redundant and try to worsen their working conditions? Apparently, incentives are required for chief executives, but sticks are needed for low-paid people, many of whom have given a lifetime of service to the civil service. They feel outraged and alienated because of the way in which they have been treated.

Mr. Smith

Those people do not need to be upset because chief executives are well paid. If good people are wanted, one must pay a reasonable price and compare it with the price paid in the private sector. I agree that a better performance will not be had from an employee by reducing his remuneration or worsening his working conditions. Better performance can be had by adopting the opposite approach—by offering incentives, measuring performance and improving job satisfaction. That is the right way to do it, and to that extent I agree with the hon. Gentleman.

The agencies have been a success. For example, a three-year evaluation in the Contributions Agency concluded that in each year efficiency savings had been exceeded and the milestone targets had been achieved and that 'Agency status has therefore clearly resulted in improved performance. accountability and value for money"'. That refers to the Contributions Agency, but I would say the same about the Benefits Agency.

The concept of customer service did not operate in the administration of social security benefits in local offices, say, 10 years ago, before the Benefits Agency was established. My local office in High Wycombe, which provides a service to my constituents, has been transformed over that time. A huge effort is made to help and advise people, some of whom are the most vulnerable in our society. It tries to provide a decent service. The system is complex and there is a range of benefits, but the service has improved.

Some people might say that the improvement is only superficial, but I do not agree. The area that people visit has greatly improved. At one time, people who visited the front office were treated almost as if they were not human beings. They were made to wait for very long periods in appalling conditions.

The whole set-up has become much more customer friendly. That is because—this relates to my point about job satisfaction—there is much more staff training at the Benefits Agency, which is good for staff and customers. As a consequence of staff training, customers are receiving a much better service.

Mr. Frank Field

Although most of us have seen the transformation of our local offices under the agency agreement—provided that we do not represent a London constituency and have found that offices have moved out of the area—does the hon. Gentleman think that the improvement will be such that in the next year or two, the Comptroller and Auditor General will be able to sign the agency's accounts, given that he has refused them an unqualified audit since income support was introduced?

Mr. Smith

It is a most unsatisfactory matter. As a member of the Public Accounts Committee, I can certainly say that the Committee is not complacent about it in the slightest. The necessity for the Comptroller and Auditor General to qualify the audit of any Government Department or executive agency is a matter for concern. It suggests that the agency's record keeping is still unsatisfactory and that there is still room for improvement, which I believe is the case.

Although I was focusing particularly on the way in which the agency deals with its customers, I acknowledge the need for improvement. When the National Audit Office carried out a sample check on the payment of income support, it found an unacceptably high error rate. That suggests that, although there has been much staff training, there is a need for more. There must be better quality outputs. That is what it is all about—measuring output and getting better performance, which at the moment is not good enough. Errors impact both ways—some beneficiaries lose out and some gain. The error rate of the Inland Revenue is not nearly as high as that of the Benefits Agency. The Benefits Agency has scope for further improvement and will have to work over the next few months and years to improve its performance.

One point in the report that interested me was the very important concept of a one-stop shop. When claimants go to a local benefits office, it is normally possible for them to see one officer, who is able to deal with the whole range of benefits. The Committee makes the point that very often such officers will have to deal not only with social security. In fact, that would be rather unusual. Somebody on income support would almost certainly be claiming housing benefit and council tax benefit, and even be dealing with the Inland Revenue—certainly if he had become unemployed in the previous 12 months. He would therefore have to deal with another Government agency.

The idea of trying to bring all those claims together at one advice point is obviously very ambitious. We are talking principally about co-operation between local benefits offices and local councils. Two different council departments would be involved—one dealing with housing benefit and one with council tax benefit. That is something which the Committee should pursue with the Government, to see what further progress can be made.

We all know, from dealing with individual constituents, that there is a bewildering maze of different benefits. To have reached the point where someone can see just one officer in a benefits office is obviously a tremendous step forward. If we could take that further, so that someone could talk to just one person about the whole range of benefits, possibly including even his income tax position, that would be a tremendous step towards helping people with a very complicated matter. Indeed, some of the benefit forms are even more complicated than income tax returns. Of course, no one gives a high priority to completing an income tax return; nor do people enthuse over doing so. The Inland Revenue says that it may be easier when we have self-assessment, but I doubt it. Claiming social security benefits is a difficult process and we should do everything we can to support people in doing so.

4.30 pm

Ms Liz Lynne (Rochdale)

This is almost a re-run of our debate in the Chamber last week on benefit fraud. Before dealing with some of the issues in the Social Security Select Committee report, I want to refer to the total amount of social security expenditure. It is fashionable for the media and hon. Members to say that social security is unaffordable. I do not doubt that spending on social security is high. Indeed, the Government estimate that it will be £90 billion for the year 1995–96, which will cost every working person £15 a day. What I want to ask all hon. Members is whether there is a cheaper alternative. Quite honestly, I do not believe that there is.

Any alternative must pass two tests—first, is it cheaper for the Department of Social Security and the Government as a whole, and secondly, is it cheaper for the people of this country? If it does not pass those tests, we shall be passing the buck, because the bill to the family will rise, even though the taxpayer might find things easier. At the end of the week, month or year, the person concerned will have to pay more.

There is a frequently expressed fear about a demographic time bomb, with the country being overrun by senior citizens in a couple of decades. In reality, the growth has already started. A DSS publication says that in 1990, 15 per cent. of the population were over 65. It predicted a slight fall to 14 per cent. in the year 2000 and then a rise to 16 per cent. in 2020. Of course, we must take account of the importance of the number of retired people in society compared with the number of people who are actually working, but even on those figures, the position will not be as bad as some of the predictions suggest. For example, the proportion of pensioners to people of working age in 1990 was 23 per cent. It is predicted that the figure will rise to 26 per cent. in 2020. That is better than the figures for 12 other European Union countries, where the proportion was 21 per cent. in 1990, rising to 29 per cent. in 2020. In other words, the figure for the EU will rise by 8 per cent. compared with a UK rise of 3 per cent.

Although I do not doubt that there are grounds for concern, I do not believe that there are grounds for alarm. Some people in the media are sounding the alarm bells, but before we start slashing spending on social security and disentitling many more people, we must look at the consequences. We must consider whether private provision is any cheaper. It certainly is not cheaper for sickness, for disability or for unemployment. The basic principle of insurance is spreading the risk; no system can spread the risk more widely than the national insurance system.

We must also examine the costs of any cuts in social security benefit to the Government and to the nation. Cuts in housing benefit and income support, for example, may save the Department of Social Security money, but what are the costs to other Departments? There may be costs to the Home Office from increasing crime, and the taxpayers' bill may go up because of homelessness. We should consider the number of homeless people with tuberculosis—200 times more than the national average. If homeless people fall ill, the cost to the national health service is greater. All Departments, especially the Department of Social Security, must look at the knock-on effects on other Departments and at the overall bill for the Government.

I now come to the Select Committee report. If there is a back-to-work strategy for unemployed and lone parents, they must be given advice about their financial position and entitlements. I welcome that, but I believe that we must also help people back into work. The payment of child care costs is a wise investment for the future. Apart from that, we need far bolder measures, and I do not believe that that point is being addressed.

The Select Committee recommended that, on a trial basis, calls to the War Pensions Agency helpline should be charged at the local rate, and I sincerely hope that the Government will accept that. I know that they have said that they will look at the suggestion and that they will consider the cost to the Department of Social Security, but I wish that they would just accept it. The recent reforms of war pensions are not going smoothly—we all know that. War pensioners and war widows need the helpline service, and they need their calls to be charged at the local rate. It is well known that I have never been a great supporter of the Child Support Agency and that I would like it to be scrapped. However, if the CSA can provide that service—anyone who telephones the CSA is charged at the local rate—I do not see why the War Pensions Agency cannot do the same.

I shall not go into detail about benefit fraud and the take-up of benefits, because we had a discussion about that last week. I welcome the Select Committee's recommendations. But anti-fraud activities have to go hand in hand with promoting the take-up of benefits, especially pensions. Some pensioners do not take up their entitlement to income support, which means that they miss the cold weather payments as well. Some 305 pensioners had hypothermia listed on their death certificate in 1994. How many of those pensioners did not get the income support and the cold weather payments to which they were entitled? The situation could get even worse if we do not promote the take-up of income support by pensioners who are supposed to get it.

Ten days ago, it was reported in The Guardian that there would be short-term savings by the Department of Social Security. It was suggested that the Department would remove services that encouraged people to obtain the £2 billion of unclaimed benefits and that there would be cuts in the telephone advice lines. It was also suggested that the Department would end the extension of benefit office opening hours and that it would stop the benefit buses—the buses that go to outlying areas, so that people's queries can be answered in their locality. Will the Minister confirm or deny that those cuts will really take place? If he confirms that they will take place, will he explain the reasoning behind the decision?

Social security spending must be closely monitored. We must fight waste, whether from fraud or from overpayment. As I have said many times, £546 million was overpaid in income support last year, mainly through official error. That must also be addressed when we talk about waste.

I welcome what the Government are doing on benefit fraud, but when it comes to the growth of expenditure on social security, we must keep things in proportion. Social security spending, as I said earlier, is high, but there is probably no cheaper alternative for families' bills at the end of the week or month. It is certainly not right simply to pass the buck to other Departments, charities or the population as a whole.

4.40 pm

Mr. Malcolm Wicks (Croydon, North-West)

It is nice to have an early opportunity to enter the debate, even though it is earlier than I, in my naivety, had expected.

We are discussing not only the recent work of the Select Committee but supplementary estimates. Indeed, we are formally asked to approve an extra £19 million to the cash limit for the running costs of the Department of Social Security. Often, the House takes scrutiny of public spending too lightly. but it should be no light matter that we are asked to approve a further £19 million. As, according to my arithmetic, much of the money is for the running costs of the Child Support Agency, I shall focus later on the work of the CSA. I hope that the Minister will be encouraged to update us on its work and present a progress report, because we need progress on the implementation of child support.

I am a recently retired member of the Social Security Committee. It is appropriate that its esteemed Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), opened the debate. It was a privilege to serve on it under his chairmanship for one parliamentary Session. I welcome the opportunity that I had to work with him and, indeed, Conservative colleagues. I had the honour of contributing in a small way to the report that we are discussing today.

We should put the supplementary estimate in the context of the increase in public expenditure on social security. In 1989–90, we spent some £50 billion on social security. That figure is now £90 billion in cash terms, which is a considerable increase. It is easily the largest of our public expenditure programmes. Indeed, it represents a staggering one third of total public expenditure.

Mr. Frank Field

Before my hon. Friend leaves this point, I hope that he will find time to talk about the change in the nature of poverty. Whereas we talked of it primarily in economic terms and causes, we now—as I think my hon. Friend is hinting at—talk of it as being much more socially based.

Mr. Wicks

Indeed. The Chairman of my former Committee anticipates some of my remarks and hits on a very important point about family insecurity. I shall say something about that, but we should dwell on the sheer size of the social security budget, which now represents one third of total public spending. Although it would be rash, I suspect, to argue the possibility of bringing that total down, I feel instinctively that it is consuming too large a proportion of public spending and, given the other demands on the welfare state and the Government, we should look critically at it.

I ask the House to distinguish between the term social security—not in the sense of rather dry terminology for a set of benefits—and state benefits. I put it to the House that what makes social security, in the proper usage of that term, is not just state benefits. Many other factors contribute to social security. Indeed, many of the other factors are often more important than the contribution to security that comes from state benefits. I also argue that, on state benefits. we need to be vigorous and rigorous about defining objectives and to look critically at the public expenditure total to see to what extent some public spending relates directly to the objectives and to true social security, and to what extent public spending is perhaps more a symptom of social insecurity and of the fact that other parts of society, the economy and public policy are not working as well as they should. I shall give one example.

I do not think that any of the great figures who have set out social security objectives have ever said that it is an objective of social security policy to enable men in their 50s or early 60s to draw benefits—whether invalidity benefits or income support—as a stop-gap measure between an early period of unemployment or redundancy and when they are able to draw their state retirement pension, yet the data on economic inactivity, or what is essentially unemployment, show that a large proportion of men who are not so old are economically inactive. They are out of the labour market.

I sometimes think that the House has a strange custom of discussing the retirement age, not least in relation to European directives towards gender equality and whether to equalise at 65, 60 or 63. We have had that debate. It is all based on an assumption that men retire at 65. Some do. Some of us may hope to retire later.

Mr. David Congdon (Croydon, North-East)

The hon. Gentleman is being optimistic.

Mr. Wicks

The hon. Gentleman—my pair—is worried about my employment security. I can tell him that I am rather more confident about it at the moment than he has any right to be about his.

Men aged 55 to 59 can hardly be considered old. One would expect some 90 per cent. of them to be in employment, but the reality is that one in three is out of work. In the slightly older group—those aged 60 to 64, who are in the period just before retirement—just over four out of 10 are in work. The amount of economic inactivity among middle-aged to older men is massive. That was never meant to be. William Beveridge, Labour Governments and Conservative Governments never said that we should support that group, through social security, income support or invalidity benefits of one kind or another to be on benefit and not in work, but it has come to be.

I was following the remarks of the hon. Member for Rotherham—

Mr. Field

Rochdale.

Mr. Wicks

It was certainly somewhere beginning with an R. I apologise to the hon. Member for Rochdale (Ms Lynne) and the good people of—

Mr. Keith Bradley (Manchester, Withington)

Rotherham.

Ms Lynne

Rochdale.

Mr. Wicks

My ungallant Friend said Rotherham, but, being more gallant, I meant Rochdale. The hon. Lady argued that we should be able to afford that sum of money. I am inclined to agree with her at one level, but only if we are convinced that we are spending it properly. I am not convinced that we are doing so at present. Let us have a debate about social security objectives and ensure that public money is spent appropriately on them.

Mr. Field

Before my hon. Friend develops that theme, may I take him back one step? He rightly emphasises that many people now feel insecure and that social security payments support that insecurity. Is it not also true that a large number of men are inactive in the age group to which he refers because they have been able to draw down their occupational pension early, so we now get the success of the company pension scheme impacting on the social security budget?

In my area—some distance from Croydon, but not that far from Rochdale—two former public utilities are merging and there will be large-scale lay-offs. We are also affected by the Mobil-BP merger, which will result in lay-offs. Does my hon. Friend think that we ought to consider whether it is necessary to issue social security impact statements when firms propose merging and, to use the euphemistic expression, downsizing their labour forces? Much of the cost of the two mergers in my area will be borne by taxpayers in general, who will have to pick up the social security costs of people who would otherwise be in work but will become unemployed, and soon unemployable, as a result of those changes.

Mr. Wicks

That is an interesting observation and recommendation, to which we shall certainly want to give more thought. If it seems to be a good idea, given that the Department of Social Security plans so radically to cut its running costs and, presumably, its labour force, perhaps it should make the first social security impact statement. The Minister might want to announce that later if he intends to proceed along those lines.

Given the importance of spending our social security money effectively, the theme of fraud, which my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead introduced, is obviously important. I shall not add to his remarks, but we agree with the emphasis he put on the need to combat fraud. We welcome the recent increased determination of the Government, but we would want to go rather further. It would be worth calculating at some stage how much money has been squandered these past 16 years because the Government have made only lame attempts to combat fraud. It must become a key social security objective to ensure the promotion of the honest social security pound; to ensure that every pound of taxpayers' money is spent as honestly as possible.

In my advice surgery in Croydon, North-West, when I sometimes have to explain to people who are hard pressed that they will not receive more benefit, despite their old age or disability, it makes me furious to think that we are being defrauded of hundreds of thousands, millions or perhaps billions of pounds that could be used for people in genuine need. It is a very human matter.

We need to distinguish between the public policies that would make for social security and the role within them of state benefits. My theme is that the two are rather different. They are not necessarily the same. We need to use the phrase "social security" in the proper sense in the English language. What makes for social security in that wider sense? I suppose that most fundamental is the economy and employment, and enabling more of our citizens to find a secure place in the job market. That is obvious. It was well understood by William Beveridge, but we need a renewed determination to enable more of our citizens to get into employment.

Therefore, Opposition Members were in despair when we heard the proposals of the Deputy Prime Minister to deregulate the employment market for those in small businesses. If there was one thing that we did not need at this precise time, it was a suggestion that a Deputy Prime Minister could be seriously contemplating making more of our citizens economically insecure and therefore insecure about their social life, their housing and the rest of it. This is precisely the time when enhancing and developing security should be one of the major and first responsibilities of government.

If economic security and employment security are important, we need to work hard at changing our social security system. I remember very well one particular constituent who came to my advice surgery in Thornton Heath about a housing problem. We talked more generally about her situation. She was on income support. She was drawing housing benefit. In some respects, she was totally dependent on the state. She was a prime example of the state of dependency that has been created these past 15 or so years, a state that we have to change in the coming five years.

When I asked my constituent how she saw her future, her eyes started to shine and she said, "I want a job." I asked her what she wanted to do. She wanted to be a traffic warden. Not only did she have determination, but she was brave, given the circumstances of Croydon traffic, and had an ambition which should have been fostered. I asked whether she ever talked of her ambition when she went to the DSS office and talked to various officials. She said that no one had ever asked her if she wanted a job. No one had ever sat down with her to talk about her ambition and how it might be realised.

Under the current social security regime, a lone mother is entitled to draw income support until her youngest child is 16. We have to start to change the culture. I am talking not about compulsion but about sensitivity. I am talking about a social security office where, in liaison with an employment office, someone would sit down with that young woman and say, "This is great news. You have a good ambition. We are going to help you. We are going to talk about your training and building any confidence that you might need,"—although this young woman did not need confidence; she had plenty of it—"We are going to talk about child care implications and the jobs that are available. We will certainly fix you up with the traffic warden people, but we will talk to other people. We can take some months on this." Was that happening? No, it was not.

The future social security system has to be in the business of helping young women such as my constituent who have no ambition to remain dependent or to draw social security for ever, but have an ambition to be independent. How we move from dependency to independence is the key theme of social security policy in the late 1990s.

I have talked about employment security. Let me also talk about family security and insecurity—the theme that my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead tempted me to discuss and one that I want to discuss. Family security is as important as economic security in enabling us to live our lives in a satisfactory way, not only in terms of cash, although that it important, but more generally. Family breakdown and related family change are now a major cause of poverty, disadvantage and new forms of inequality that are opening up in our society. If we need evidence of that, it comes in part from the Select Committee report on low income statistics that was published in February 1995. The report includes a table that shows that family breakdown and the rise of the lone-parent family is probably a more important cause of poverty and disadvantage than are the traditional causes of unemployment and low wages.

Data for 1992 show that 3.6 million—almost 3.7 million—children in Great Britain are dependent on income support or in families that have net resources below the income support level because of low wages. That is a shocking indicator of child poverty in a supposedly affluent society. Of those children, 1.8 million are in lone-parent families. Unemployment contributes a huge 1 million children, but the number of children in lone-parent families is much greater. William Beveridge would not have recognised that phenomenon. In 1942, when he and Parliament examined the causes of social insecurity that needed to be tackled by social insurance and the national assistance scheme, that factor was not uppermost in their minds. We need to work hard at addressing that considerable problem.

I want to consider how the power and pace of family change contribute to social insecurity and new forms of child poverty. First, more children are born out of wedlock. I make no moral judgments on that—it is not the subject of the debate—but the statistics relate to our theme of child poverty and social insecurity. Back in 1960, only 5 per cent. of children were born out of wedlock. Today, the proportion is a massive 32 per cent. Nearly one in three children are born outside marriage. Half of them are born to cohabiting couples; the other half to single unmarried mothers. We know that 85 per cent. of single unmarried mothers draw income support. It is a demographic trend of direct relevance to the estimates and public spending.

While cohabitation comes in all shapes and sizes and can include some of the most well-to-do and affluent couples, there is a general association between cohabitation and disadvantage. Although demographers are not clear about it, my reading of the research suggests that cohabiting parents are more likely to suffer a breakdown of their relationship than are married couple parents. That is a contributory factor to insecurity. I have mentioned the change since 1960, but over the past decade alone, the number of children born outside marriage has almost doubled. That is a rapid change with major consequences for our debates on social security and social insecurity.

There is also the question of divorce, which is exercising our minds and those of modern Governments more and more. It is no coincidence that the House will soon receive a Bill on divorce law reform from the other place. The key question is how to obtain a modern divorce law that puts children first. Pension splitting and the social security implications of divorce are related themes. The Child Support Agency is another consequence of divorce and has become a powerful theme. The bad news is that it will become even more important in the future.

I recently asked a parliamentary question to update some data with which I had been familiar when I worked at the Family Policy Studies Centre. I asked Government statisticians, who are the best in the country for such forecasting, what percentage of marriages are likely to end in divorce. The answer was 41 per cent.—more than four out of 10. That forecast is not wild, but a sober estimate by sensible demographers and scientists. The issues surrounding that, which relate to child maintenance, are crucial to our social security. I shall come to them later. If we do not get that right, we are in deep trouble in respect of insecurities among families and of state spending on benefits.

Every year, there are 160,000 children under 16 in Great Britain whose parents divorce. It is interesting that the children involved are becoming younger. Divorces occur more quickly than they did 10 or 15 years ago. The figures for 1993 for England and Wales show that there were 55,000 children under five who had mums and dads who divorced—25 per cent. more than in 1983. Not only are many children affected by the phenomenon but they are wearing an even younger face than they used to. More children spend some or all of their childhoods in one-parent families.

The picture is further complicated by remarriage and, to use a slightly ugly expression, repartnering. The Minister winces because he is a sensitive man. I use the word because cohabitation is more common after the break-up of first marriages than as a substitute for first marriages. We have to invent a term for that. One in three marriages this weekend will involve someone marrying for the second time.

The phenomenon of the step-family, which is well known in literature and fairy tales, is becoming more important. It is estimated that 1 million or more children under 16 live in step-families. Of them, 770,000—the majority—are stepchildren but 280,000 are children of new relationships. Any attempt by society through state and government to consider the social policy implications of those trends, not least in relation to child maintenance, deals with complex territory. The complexity of the child support formula needs to be addressed. There is a legitimate debate about whether it should be yet more complex—more sensitive to particular circumstances—or whether we should have a simpler formula and rougher justice. I believe that the Select Committee will consider that issue in this Session.

The complexity is caused by the family circumstances and human relationships becoming more complex. Politicians, the Government and Parliament have been slow to address those issues because they feel uncomfortable about tackling some of the most difficult, complex and sensitive matters in society. The politician treads into the blood and thunder of human relationships and their breakdown at his or her peril. Even the best imaginable system, which I am bound to say we do not have at the moment, will run into difficulties because of that. That is relevant because the Government are asking us to approve supplementary estimates that include another £16 million for the running of the Child Support Agency.

Mr. Tim Smith

The hon. Gentleman has given us an interesting description of recent social trends and many of the aspects that he describes are deeply worrying. Is he suggesting that the social security system has been the cause of those trends? I wonder what he thinks we should do about them, if anything. How should the social security system respond to them? He said that we are spending too much on social security, so what changes do we need to make?

Mr. Wicks

I shall deal with the Child Support Agency and how we can create more effectiveness and fairness later. In direct response to the hon. Gentleman's thoughtful question, however, I do not believe that our social security arrangements contribute to family breakdown, although I recognise that there is an interesting debate to be had on that point.

At the moment, we seem to spend an awful lot of energy, time, legislation and public money on the consequences of family breakdown. The House of Commons Library gave me some figures, which show that the public costs of divorce are about £4 billion every year. Most of that is made up of social security—income support and so forth—but some is legal aid and the impact on the health service. How much money are we spending trying to save marriages and support family relationships? We spend money on Relate and other marriage guidance services.

I want a shift of emphasis towards trying to support and help relationships in trouble, rather than spending all our energy and public resources on breakdown when it occurs. As a long-standing advocate of a family policy strategy, I would certainly say that we have not got the balance right.

I am arguing that the social revolution of family change that we are in the midst of has not been without victims. It has not been a bloodless revolution—there are very few such revolutions. Victims come in all shapes and sizes and, of course, include many men, not least those who find that they are unable to continue a relationship with their children.

In financial terms, the main victims have always been, and remain, the women and children. It has been a case of women and children last in that aspect of family politics. We see that in the poverty statistics and in the fact that, in the main—of course, there are exceptions—it is women and children who have to depend on the state and on income support. One million one-parent families are drawing income support.

Whatever our criticism of the operation of the CSA—being a passionate believer in the principle of parental responsibility, I am among the foremost critics of the workings of that agency in practice—we must remember that the old system simply did not work. Anyone who advocates turning back the clock to a court-based system has to confront the data and the evidence that show that it was a failure. It delivered maintenance to only about one third of children.

Ms Lynne

I agree that the old system of the liable relatives unit, in particular, was a failure. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, in terms of cost, there is not much to choose between the CSA and the old system? Some figures that I have obtained even suggest that the old liable relatives unit was far most cost-effective in saving the taxpayer money. Although I would not want a return to that unit—I would like a unified family court system, in which every case was assessed individually—I want us to get away from the formula system.

Mr. Wicks

I understand the hon. Lady's argument, but I do not support it. We cannot return to that sort of court system, although I know that the hon. Lady denies it. We need to think hard about ways of bringing greater sensitivity and justice into the system. I shall deal with that briefly later, if there is time.

It is a pity that we do not know more about the workings of the old maintenance system. I do not think that it was researched thoroughly and I have never seen a proper report on it. Our public debates on its pros and cons would be advanced if we had more information.

I have already hinted at the argument that, given the complexity of human and family relationships, developing an effective child support or maintenance policy was always going to be difficult. Although those of us who had the opportunity to study the Australian and New Zealand systems of child support recently were impressed by aspects of those systems—certainly by the Australian system—even in those societies the systems have been immensely controversial and the subject of the majority of contributions to parliamentarians' postbags, as in this country.

I do not think that I say this merely with the benefit of hindsight—the case was argued at the time—but the Child Support Agency should have been introduced in a far more sensitive way. Ideally—in the politics of Thatcherism it was never going to happen—the emphasis should have been placed on child support as social policy, not on the mean-minded morality that it quickly became when it was introduced by the former Prime Minister, then Mrs. Thatcher. After all, it is called child support; it should have been genuine child support. I am becoming increasingly concerned about the matter because, in a sense, we have missed an historic opportunity for a proper public debate about child support and the obligations of parents to their children.

I can think of two questions that should have been central to that debate—there are probably others. First, how, in the great majority of cases, do we enable both parents to share in the care and maintenance of their children in turbulent family times? There will always be exceptions when men are violent and so forth.

I have reviewed briefly some of the demographics, but my argument is that, sadly, turbulent family times will not go away in the next 10 years. If—this may now be true—only about 50 per cent. of children will spend all their childhood in what we once would have called the traditional family and are born to parents who are married to one another and stay married until the children become adult, these issues do not merely concern a minority of our people and our children, but are central. Despite divorce and the phenomenon of children being born outside wedlock, how do we enable both parents to share in the care and maintenance of their children? That is a central question. Hon. Members will notice that I said care and maintenance. It is about not merely money and cash, but parental responsibility in a wider sense.

Secondly, how do we avoid the trends becoming forces for child poverty and disadvantage? Instead of having that sensible debate, we had Thatcherite mean-mindedness posing as morality. It was led by the then Prime Minister. I well remember her speech to the National Children's Home. That speech and her emphasis on parental responsibility, which she tackled in her own particular way, was as much a surprise to Social Security Ministers as to the rest of us. They did not see the policy coming—they saw it as a hand grenade rolling towards them, with the pin half pulled out. The Treasury then seized the opportunity—it saw the policy as a major way of raising revenue—and thwarted the Department of Social Security when, I suspect, it was arguing that there should be a disregard, as we call it in technical language, to enable mothers on income support at least to get some child support so that their net incomes and the welfare of their children could be enhanced.

The combination of the then Prime Minister's policy and the Treasury seizing the opportunity led to the bad start to child maintenance from which we have not recovered thus far, and from which it will be difficult to recover. I refer to the quite extraordinary catastrophe that the Child Support Agency quickly became. It takes months to make assessments, it has a huge error rate and it is insensitive to those who are trying to communicate with it. I do not have the opportunity today to discuss the Child Support Agency in great detail, but it is appropriate—not least because £16 million of the supplementary estimate that we are being asked to approve today is for running the Child Support Agency—to ask some questions of the Under-Secretary of State.

Will the Minister give hon. Members an up-to-date report on, and the accuracy of, the time taken to undertake the assessments and enforcement within the agency? I believe that such an update would be most helpful. Will the Minister also tell hon. Members how much child support is now being collected and the projections for the coming financial year? In addition, how much of that money will go to the Exchequer and how much of it will go to the parent with care—normally, but not always, the mother?

Does the Minister have anything to say about improving, or developing the human face of, the Child Support Agency, given its reputation for insensitivity? Are there ways in which the people dealing with the agency—whether they are the mothers, usually the parents with care, or the fathers, the so-called absent parents—can be made to feel that someone at the end of the telephone line understands their case and can discuss it with them in a human way?

Many hon. Members are interested in and impressed by the so-called CAST system being pioneered at the Hastings centre. Some months ago, I had the opportunity to visit the centre and I talked to the staff about the system. It is an attempt to deal with people in the round. It would be useful to know how it is progressing. Does the Minister have any plans to expand the system across the country?

Traditionally, complaints about the workings of the Child Support Agency have come from men—the so-called absent parents. I have received many letters about the way in which many men, quite understandably, feel resentful about being called "absent parents". We are still grappling with the terminology on this issue. Given that being a parent is not just about paying maintenance, but is about providing care to children—as so many fathers do in difficult family circumstances—we need better terminology. The term "absent parent" is an insult.

Mr. Frank Field

Will my father—will my hon. Friend give way? The Select Committee on Social Security has suggested that we use the word "father".

Mr. Wicks

I am glad that my hon. Friend confirmed that I am not his father—if I were, I would struggle to pay maintenance on him. As nine out of 10 parents with care are mothers—and, therefore, nine out of 10 absent parents are fathers—we could often use the term "father". However, we must allow for the reverse situation.

Ms Lynne

I suggest that the term "liable parent" could be used instead of the terms "absent parent" or "father". Some liable parents—only a few—are mothers.

Mr. Wicks

I take that important point.

Many of the fathers who write to me or to other hon. Members about grievances to do with child support are often doing their best to pay the child maintenance. However, they find that, when there_ is a change in their circumstances—for example, a postman may have a higher rate of pay over Christmas but then wants to tell the Child Support Agency that his wages have decreased—it is enormously difficult to communicate with the agency. For example, they can never find one person at the end of the telephone line who will take their point, put it into the system and report back to them in a decent way to say that their assessment has been varied.

We all have the right to expect that kind of obvious sensitivity when we are dealing with a bank or with a building society—I am not saying that we always get it from those institutions—and we want to bring it into the workings of the Child Support Agency. Many men feel aggrieved—and justifiably so—and we need to allow for that in any reforms of the agency.

Many mothers—the parents with care—also have grievances about the way in which the Child Support Agency has not delivered. I shall quote a letter—with care as I want to protect the identity of the woman—from a mother who has recently come to see me at the House of Commons about her situation. She is a young mother with a son, and she was on income support at one stage and contacted the Child Support Agency. She has since found a full-time job in London at a reasonable, but not generous, level of pay. She lives in the home counties. For the past two or three years she has been trying to get the Child Support Agency to find the father of her child so that he will contribute some maintenance. In many ways, she illustrates the kind of benefit-to-work strategy of which we are all in favour. She has a tough life. Her letter states: As a working mother, my day starts at 7.40 am when I leave for work; I don't get home until 7.30, when I collect my son from the childminder's. I then return home and have to do all the household chores. This is not a situation I deliberately created—I was forced to leave my son's father because he is a very violent man and I feared for our safety. I even had to have a non-molestation order served against him. She has told me that she has not received any maintenance payments from the man since she left him. She also told me that this man has four other children, by two other relationships, and that he pays maintenance towards none of the children—a fact that he openly laughs about.

I shall not go into too much detail about the mother and her situation, except to say that, for two or three years, she has been trying to get the Child Support Agency to act. She told me in our meeting that she thought that the Child Support Agency was there to help her and her son, and that she cannot understand why it has not delivered. I was appalled when I looked at some of the correspondence on this issue between the Child Support Agency and another hon. Member. That woman knew where the man was, knew that he was in employment and believed that he earned about £400 a week. She gave the Child Support Agency the man's address and the agency wrote to the address. The man or his new girlfriend scribbled on the back of the envelope, "Not known at this address" and the Child Support Agency told the woman, "I am sorry; he is not known at that address." If that is the sophistication of the Child Support Agency, we are in deep trouble.

The woman rang up the Child Support Agency one day to say, "I can tell you that he is in employment, because I have heard that he is." The agency staff said, "We shall try to trace the employer," but later told her, "I am sorry; we cannot trace the employer." The woman said, "Hold on a moment, I shall call you back." She made a few telephone calls and found out where the man was working—on a highway, doing construction work. She told the Child Support Agency all about it, but still there was no action.

That story lasted several years. Eventually, the Child Support Agency managed to track down the man and produced an interim maintenance assessment, but made a procedural mistake and had to withdraw it. Two or three years later, the man has paid no maintenance towards that little boy or any of his four other children.

When the woman first approached the agency, she was told by the man from the agency on the telephone, "It will be difficult; he is self-employed. If I were you, I wouldn't bother." The Child Support Act 1991, passed by Parliament with much support on both sides of the House, is not delivering to that woman and her child.

Generalisations are unfair; I know that the agency has tracked down some such men, but suspicion remains that the agency regards as a soft touch men in secure employment in a major private company or in the public sector—teachers, police officers and so on—and pursues them to obtain more money from them, but that many men in difficult cases continue to get away with it. Some fathers are laughing at Parliament, at the agency and at the mothers and their children, saying, "I won't pay anything. I would rather go to prison than pay anything. They will never catch me," and continue to get away with it. That is not what Parliament intended. It has brought the Child Support Agency into grave disrepute because people do not regard it as effective social policy or effective child support.

As part of Labour's general review of social security, we have been reconsidering the operation of the child support system. We reaffirm easily and clearly our principled support for the important principle of parental responsibility, but we are angry and worried that that decent principle—indeed, a guiding principle in the turbulent family times in which we find ourselves—is brought into disrepute by the continuing thoroughly bad practice of the Child Support Agency.

We reaffirm our commitment to the principle of introducing a disregard so that mothers who are on income support, every penny of whose child maintenance is currently taken away from their income support, obtain some net income and net benefit from it. We are not in a position to say when the disregard might be introduced or the amount because, obviously, that depends on total commitments and other spending priorities, but we reaffirm that important principle. If the public and some fathers—some of the so-called "absent parents"—could be sure that a certain fraction of their child maintenance went directly into the pockets of mothers and benefited their own children, we would start to turn the position around and bring what is at the moment a mean-minded piece of policy into the true province of social policy. That is the challenge.

In considering in more detail the workings of the Child Support Agency, Opposition Members have two major objectives—fairness and efficiency.

A disregard would be an important step forward in fairness. People would regard that as fair to the taxpayer, because the taxpayer would continue to benefit from most of the extra revenue coming in. We have no quarrel with that; the taxpayer has a major interest. The taxpayer is not an anonymous person but often a mother or father, struggling to bring up children and resenting having to contribute too much to other people's children. We acknowledge that the taxpayer has a legitimate interest, but we need to strike a fairer balance between the interests of taxpayers and the interests of mothers and their children. We shall strike that balance.

We need to review the operations of the Child Support Agency to seek a way to introduce a greater sense of independence and fairness into the system. At the moment, people feel that they are dealing with a monolithic agency—a grey, bureaucratic agency—that can never deal with them in the round. It would be a step in the right direction to find a way to allow people who feel a sense of grievance that they are not being treated properly or whose family position is so complex that they do not believe that the formula can deal with them properly, an independent review or adjudication. We are investigating that in detail.

Greater efficiency is needed. It is nonsensical that it takes months to process assessments and that, in the case that I described of the young mother struggling to do her best for her child, the system is so ineffective that, despite being given all the clues, all the details and all the addresses by that woman, the agency cannot yet find that man and make him pay maintenance. We need greater effectiveness.

Yes, we support the principle of parental responsibility—I could not have made that clearer—but we need to consider the workings of the agency, so that we shall be able to say one day that it is as effective as possible and fairer than it ever has been.

The major challenge for the House in turbulent family times is to ensure that parental responsibility works, because all our children deserve to be brought up, wherever possible, by both their parents. We need care and responsibility. Saving the decent principle of parental responsibility from bad practice is a key challenge for future social policy.

5.36 pm

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Social Security (Mr. Andrew Mitchell)

This afternoon, we have listened to four very interesting speeches by my hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Smith) and by Opposition Members. This has been a shortish debate, which may reflect the fact that, in the past three weeks, we have had three major debates on social security. Opposition Members—and indeed Conservative Members—may he suffering from social security fatigue.

Coming relatively fresh to estimates debates, I am struck by how much has changed in the way in which these matters are discussed in the three years since my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State delivered his Mais lecture. A copy of the lecture is indispensable to any discussion of social security in much the same way as the thoughts and writings of the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), who opened today's debate, whose speeches are also indispensable to any junior Minister trying to work his way through the maze of social security.

Three years ago, politicians tended to boast about the increase in welfare spending. I remember that a leading Labour academic wrote a paper called "The Future of Welfare: A Guide to the Debate", in which he advocated that an extra 5 per cent. of gross domestic product on social security spending would do the trick.

The hon. Member for Croydon, North-West (Mr. Wicks) made kind remarks about Government statisticians, which I shall pass on, and said that he wanted to consider appropriate objectives for social security. Conservative Members have little doubt what the appropriate objectives are. In recent years there has been a reduction in the underlying growth in social security, not only because it is a burden to the taxpayer, but because of the growth in the dependency culture, which is wrong. Many of those changes were enshrined in last year's heavy social security legislative programme. We are now enabling the country to meet genuine need without outstripping the country's ability to pay.

I fear that we remain in considerable doubt about the Labour party's views; it is not at all clear where it is heading. All will be revealed on 8 May when the hon. Member for Croydon, North-West and his hon. Friends on the Opposition Front Bench announce the result of their six-month review—they have been instructed by their leader to think the unthinkable. We are all waiting with bated breath to hear what emerges from that important process.

If we consider the international comparisons overseas, we see just how far ahead of the field the Government are on the issue of social security. In Germany, there is widespread discussion of the problem of non-wage labour costs and the burdens that they impose on an economy that is struggling to reach the Maastricht criteria. Unemployment in Germany is higher than at any time since the last war, and reached 4.3 million in February.

The position in France is no less severe. France is also suffering high social costs, as we know from the vivid media reports of the recent unrest in Paris and other big cities. In the face of widespread strikes by public sector workers in November, Jacques Barrot, the Social Affairs Minster, said: "There is no alternative" to welfare reform. The strikers were protesting against the social security reforms announced by the Prime Minister.

In a television interview in October, President Chirac called on France to follow the courageous example of the UK in reducing public expenditure. He spoke of the urgent need to reduce the public deficit, especially that of the social security budget. He said that France had lived beyond its means for too long. But in the face of continued strikes and protests, the French Government have had to backtrack on some of their planned reforms: they have given way over public sector pensions and postponed the proposed taxation of family benefits.

I gave those international comparisons as they show not only the extent to which the Labour party is still wallowing about and trying to work out where to go, but how far ahead of the international game the British Government are in tackling those difficult problems.

Mr. Tim Smith

My hon. Friend is right: there is no doubt that the United Kingdom Government are far ahead of the game in dealing with the burgeoning cost of social security spending. Does he agree that it is striking that the hon. Member for Croydon, North-West (Mr. Wicks) said that he wanted to cut the total amount of social security spending—he said that it was too high at one third of the total—but every time that the Secretary of State makes relatively minor reductions in spending, the Labour party opposes them?

Mr. Mitchell

My hon. Friend is right, which is why he must make a note in his diary for 8 May, the date on which the Opposition will advise the House of their programmes and plans after their six-month review. I see from what my hon. Friend said that he is looking forward to that day as much as I am.

Mr. Wicks

The Government—faced with rocketing social security spending because of the economic recession and a lack of decent social policy—have made benefit claimants suffer by cutting and withdrawing their benefits. But the proper strategy, which new Labour will adopt, is to get people off benefit; there are simply too many people on income support. We shall have a proper benefit-to-work strategy that will get people off benefit. The difference between the Conservatives and the Labour party is that, under the last Labour Government, there were not so many people on income support or supplementary benefit.

Mr. Mitchell

The hon. Gentleman will have to do better than that if he is to convince the House on 8 May that his party has a serious social security strategy, and I look forward to what he has to say on that day.

In his important contribution, my hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield talked about the work of the agencies and the success that they have achieved. He mentioned the fact that the work of the Department and its agencies is tagged, in an attachment to the Select Committee's report, on today's Order Paper. The report confirms the agencies' success and the improvements that they have brought about.

The agencies' benefits include improved clarification of roles and responsibilities in framework documents, and greater public accountability through the publication of business plans and annual reports and accounts. Responsibility for decision making is devolved to the lowest suitable level closest to the point of delivery, allowing real improvements in customer service and efficiency to be made.

The improvements derived from agency status can also easily be seen by the agencies' customers in the service that they now receive. Better customer service has been achieved because the agencies have allowed improvements in management through greater coherence in control and planning, and through service-level agreements that protect the services that customers can expect to receive. As agencies focus on specific areas of business, it has also been possible to consider ways of achieving further efficiencies, and each agency is required to identify and deliver a challenging efficiency programme each year.

The agencies are a success—that is easily demonstrated by a range of published figures. But there is still room for further improvements in efficiency, which is why my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has announced the Department's change programme. Under that programme. a key step in our long-term review of social security, we are taking a fundamental look at what we deliver and how we deliver it over the next three years.

The hon. Member for Rochdale (Ms Lynne) asked me to comment on a leak in The Guardian. I do not normally comment on leaks of material, but the article refers to an early document relating to the Department's running costs review. and no decisions have been taken on the subjects mentioned.

The elimination of fraud—which was comprehensively covered in last week's debate and by the hon. Member for Birkenhead today—is not an afterthought. Reducing administrative costs will not be done at the expense of safeguarding benefit money. Our objective is to deliver the right money to the right people at the right time, whereas fraud involves money going to the wrong person. The extra funds secured for the security programme are ring-fenced for use on specific security and control activity, and cannot be diverted. We are committed to reducing the level of fraud by 70 per cent. over the security strategy period and the target will be unaffected by proposals in the change programme.

The hon. Member for Croydon, North-West spoke about the dangers and disasters of family breakdown. He spoke about security, particularly job security. I am sure that he would want to pay credit to the Government's in-work programme and their family credit programme, which make an important contribution at one level to the points that he raised. But at another level the hon. Gentleman spoke of the vital necessity of the Child Support Agency. I want to address a number of points that he raised on that subject.

I have today laid regulations before the House that pave the way for the trial of an important change in the way that child support liability is calculated. The new provisions will introduce an element of discretion that will allow the Child Support Agency to take account of certain special expenses and other commitments that the standard assessment formula is unable to accommodate.

The new provisions will deal with a number of specific issues. At present, the calculation of liability is governed by the assessment formula. That formula is necessarily detailed as it attempts to deal with the wide variety of circumstances that may be present in any particular case. However, despite the formula's detailed nature, it is impossible for such a system to meet every eventuality.

The new provisions will introduce the flexibility required to allow greater recognition of special expenses and other commitments that are not covered by the formula. It will also enable the agency to crack down on absent parents, principally fathers, who seek to reduce their child support liabilities by diverting income elsewhere.

It will be possible for a parent to apply for a departure direction under three broad categories: where there is a special expense; where there has been a property or capital transfer—a so-called clean-break case; or in other specified circumstances. We shall pilot the measure in the south-east of England, where it will be based on the Hastings Child Support Agency centre. Subject to evaluation and the pilot scheme's success, I hope to introduce it throughout the nation in December of this year.

These changes to the policy go hand in hand with a determined drive to improve the efficiency of the Child Support Agency—the hon. Member for Croydon, North-West spoke of the importance of doing so. The signs of recovery are now there for all to see and the agency's performance is improving in all areas of its work. While improvements may not have been dramatic, they have been steady and continuous. That is not to say that I am satisfied with the present state of affairs; there is certainly no room for complacency. We are constantly looking for ways in which to improve administration and streamline procedures in order to boost performance. Indeed, I expect to lay further regulations before the House in June. They will introduce more administrative improvements—for example, simplifying the way in which housing costs are calculated, and streamlining the procedures relating to reduced benefit directions. As many hon. Members will know, the calculation of housing costs has been lengthy, administratively complex and prone to inaccuracy; some simple changes should lead to worthwhile improvement.

Sir Donald Thompson (Calder Valley)

My hon. Friend may say that I have only just entered the Chamber. Thanks to the wonders of information technology, however, I have been watching both him and the hon. Member for Croydon, North-West (Mr. Wicks)—who made a thoughtful speech—on the box in my office.

Will the housing costs to which my hon. Friend referred include mortgage costs? We hear endless stories of one partner claiming that the mortgage is now higher, while the other—the former spouse—retorts that the aim in taking out such a large mortgage is merely to twist him or her, and diddle the children.

Mr. Mitchell

The point made by my hon. Friend—with which I am very familiar, as he has brought two of his constituents to discuss it with me—is dealt with in the departures that I mentioned a moment ago, which we are piloting from today.

Achieving major improvements in a large organisation that is performing a complicated task in difficult circumstances is not easy; but, although I realise that improvements will take time, no one should doubt my determination to ensure that the CSA achieves the standards that its customers have the right to expect. We are setting challenging targets for further progress, and I am determined to ensure that they are met.

The hon. Member for Croydon, North-West asked about a number of those challenges. First, he asked about accuracy. That has improved significantly. Accuracy within 1p—that is the way in which we measure it—was set a 75 per cent. target this year; in the last month, 77 per cent. was achieved. A target of 85 per cent. will be set for next year. As the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead will realise, that is a significant improvement in comparison with accuracy in regard to income support.

The hon. Member for Croydon, North-West also asked about collections. The agency hopes to reach its target for the current financial year of £300 million collected and arranged—a steep increase on last year's figure—and will set a target of between £380 million and £400 million for next year. Substantial progress has already been made, and I expect more to be made next year.

The hon. Gentleman spoke of the public face of the CSA. Far more emphasis has been placed on the training of staff, to ensure that they respond to a number of criticisms made by clients. In particular, the hon. Gentleman mentioned the CAST system. Following a change in CSA policy, clients who used to negotiate with people who specialised in only one function will be able to deal with a "table" of people who are fully conversant with all aspects of their case.

The hon. Gentleman paid tribute to the system that is now up and running in Hastings. Over the next year, it will spread to all six child support assessment centres. He also spoke of the importance of seeing a friendly face. The fact that assessments are now increasingly dealt with in the field rather than at one of the six centres will help tremendously in achieving that.

These changes, along with the continuing improvements in the administration of the scheme, will speed the process of public acceptance of the principles behind the Child Support Act 1991. The changes introduced by the regulations are part of the process of civilising the scheme that we began last year. We have already ensured that maintenance should not exceed 30 per cent. of an absent parent's income, and the new arrangements will give us the flexibility that we need to provide further help for parents on whom the formula bears hardest.

A point was made about the description "absent parent" or "parent with care": I await a letter promised to me by the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Miss Hoey), who wishes to advance specific ideas of behalf of the Select Committee. We shall give serious consideration to what she says.

In a most interesting speech, the hon. Member for Birkenhead took us to task for the extent to which we have borne down on fraud. I am sorry if I am misquoting him; I think that he wanted to ensure that our work in countering fraudulent activity was up to the mark. We pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman, who is almost alone among Opposition Members in taking a serious interest in the subject, and we shall take careful note of what he said.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned landlord fraud. Let me point out that about a third of rents are reduced—in respect of the eligibility rent level—as a result of examination. We are opposed to all fraud. I suspect that landlord fraud is impossible without a real or imagined claimant, but we take the hon. Gentleman's points seriously, and will examine them all in detail.

I believe that today's debate and, indeed, our last two major debates on social security show that the Government are succeeding in containing the growth of social security spending, while ensuring that we have a system that helps those who need it. Long-term control has not, however, been achieved at the expense of the most needy. We shall maintain the value of benefits this year by uprating in line with inflation, at a cost of more than £2.5 billion.

A number of the changes that have been announced will enable people to become more self-reliant—easing the transition from benefit dependency to independence, allowing those people to return to work and encouraging them to stay there. Reforms are making people think about providing for their own future, and encouraging them to join insurance schemes to cater for contingencies such as unemployment, illness and retirement. At the same time, the state will always provide a safety net for those who cannot afford to help themselves.

Social security spending has been declining as a proportion of gross domestic product, a downward trend that is set to continue. We are the envy of our European neighbours in that regard. Controlling growth is important for both the taxpayer and the economy, and, as a result of the reforms, a reduction of £8 billion in expenditure is expected by the end of the century—the equivalent of around 3p on the basic rate of income tax.

It is clear that the whole debate on social security has changed. It is the Government who are defining that debate, and setting the agenda for the future. We wait patiently to hear something coherent and sensible from the Opposition, but so far we have waited in vain.

5.56 pm

Mr. Frank Field

By leave of the House, Madam Deputy Speaker, I shall reply to the debate.

Although our debate has been marred by the Trappist vows embraced by—largely—Conservative Members, it has featured some undoubted pleasures. I do not think that this is the first time that the Minister has spoken at the Dispatch Box, but it is the first time that I have faced him, and I hope that he will not take it amiss if I say that his confidence was matched by his enthusiasm: his ministerial career will clearly be limited by the date of the general election rather than by the extent of his ability.

It was a particular pleasure to listen to what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North-West (Mr. Wicks). I come from a shipbuilding town, where we still talk about launches. My hon. Friend's shadow ministerial career was launched today, and no one who heard his speech will be in any doubt about how fine that liner is.

I want to comment on three aspects of the debate. In an important speech, the Conservative non-Trappist, the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Smith), spoke of one of the gains from agency status—the higher status that it will give individual workers. I hope that that is something to which the Treasury Bench will pay attention.

When I first visited the Child Support Agency building in Birkenhead, I was informed by staff—not the management—that more than half of the new clerical assistants were graduates and that their pay was £6,900 a year. My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North-West spoke about supporting the family. I imagine that it is difficult to support a family successfully if one of the breadwinners, or the only breadwinner, is earning £6,900 a year. We need to think about family wages. Status is not something just to be talked about: it must be reflected in the workplace and in wages. I hope that the agency will bear that in mind.

The Minister showed his skill in talking up the Government's record in cutting down the social security budget. If one did not pay too much attention to what the Government said, one might almost think that they were successful in this respect. If we took ourselves back to 1979 and asked an unsuspecting public whether a Government who were spending what is now being spent on social security, and who had a record of increases such as that which we have witnessed since 1979, were Labour or Tory, they would say that the Government must be Labour because only Labour would spend so much money on social security. This is not the time to argue about how the money has been spent and how it has been skewed towards means testing; I simply want to leave the Minister with one message to take back to the Secretary of State.

We constantly hear from the Treasury Bench about the Government's success in controlling the social security budget. That is nonsense. The Secretary of State for Social Security is a tough Minister, but if we examine every one of the four years of his stewardship of the Department, we find that the Treasury increased the amount that it thought it was going to allow for social security expenditure and that the Secretary of State bust the total. The following year, the Secretary of State again bust the increased level. It has happened in all of the years that he has been Secretary of State for Social Security—the increased budget that was negotiated has been burst by at least £1 billion.

The Secretary of State is controlling the social security budget and bringing it below the increased growth rate of the economy—only if we believe his words, not if we examine his record. If his record this year is like his record for each of the past four years, the social security budget will rise faster than the underlying growth rate of the economy.

Sir Donald Thompson

Would the hon. Gentleman mind if I put that in my election address?

Mr. Field

I should be happy for the hon. Gentleman to do so.

My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North-West talked about the need for us to bring the debate up to date. That is similar to the debate raised by Eleanor Rathbone, in the House and elsewhere, on the distribution of income. During the rise of new Liberalism, prior to new Labourism, she said that the emphasis in the debate on the condition of the people was on which social class got what share of the national income. The debate was primarily about which men in which jobs attracted what sort of wages. She said that it was as important, if not more important, to examine the distribution of income between families with children and families without children. The depth charge that she threw into the debate still has to be dealt with.

My hon. Friend picked up on a similar aspect of the debate when he gently reprimanded us for talking about poverty in old-fashioned terms and saying that poverty is primarily determined by economic forces. We approach the subject by asking, "Are we old and therefore out of the labour market? Are we sick or unemployed and therefore out of the labour market?" My hon. Friend drew attention to the fact that, if poverty is measured by eligibility for income support, more children are poor because they live in households with only one parent than are poor because both parents are unemployed or because one parent is unemployed.

In Birkenhead on Saturday there was a "Church action on poverty" hearing. We were invited to listen to people who are poor. The first presentations illustrated exactly what my hon. Friend said about poverty and family break-up, and one of my friends at the meeting—a Liberal councillor—wondered whether we were talking about something new. Everyone became defensive because we were hearing that family break-up was a cause of poverty.

As the debate unfolded in the afternoon, a number of people got to their feet and said that they felt that they were under attack and that we were somehow blaming them for being poor. The debate that my hon. Friend has started today must be approached with enormous sensitivity because we are saying something new which might be misinterpreted but also because people can be hurt by what we say. The responsibility for some of the trends mentioned by my hon. Friend rests with the House, in that the way in which we have spoken has made it easier for people to assume positions that they would not previously have assumed.

In speaking about means testing, I have mentioned people working the system rather than working to get off benefit. I have primarily tried to blame the House for that, not my constituents whose limited opportunities may lead them to work the system.

The same applies to family break-ups. If we pilot through the House divorce reforms that allow people to break the marriage contract after a period only half the length of an average hire purchase agreement, we are sending a powerful message—we think that a HP agreement is more important than a marriage contract. That is not to say that people will not work hard at their marriages; marriages may still fail at the end of the day. I am not pointing the finger, but if we defend HP agreements more strongly than we defend the marriage contract, we are sending a dynamic message to the country. If citizens then respond in a certain way to what we are saying, we should be the last people to reprehend them. We should examine the impact of our actions on the world outside.

My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North-West said that we have to get away from blaming poverty on economic causes and must consider more personal reasons such as family break-up, but I hope that we do not fall into the syndrome of blaming victims from the past. We should conduct the debate sensitively along the lines that he followed and look to the future rather than trying to get out of our responsibility for the circumstances that we are now, unhappily, debating.

Despite the Trappist monks who populate the Treasury Bench, this has been an important debate. There have been two good firsts—I was able to hear the Minister speak for the first time and to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North-West begin his shadow, but soon—no doubt—ministerial, career. We also heard some important suggestions from the hon. Member for Beaconsfield, which I hope the Ministers will note carefully and act on later today when they get back to their desks.

Question deferred, pursuant to paragraph (4) of Standing Order No. 52 (Consideration of Estimates).